The Hot Network

The long-dominant CBS eye blinked hard last week. For the seventh straight week, ABC led in television's prime-time ratings. The network raced away with the "second season," claiming a 34.3 share of the audience compared with CBS's 30.5 and NBC's 29.1.-- Although it is unlikely that ABC will pass CBS in the overall season's ratings, the perennially third network will almost certainly oust NBC from its accustomed No. 2 spot.

"I never thought I'd hear the words 'an ABC night' " marvels TV Consultant Mike Dann, who was chief programming strategist, first for NBC, then for CBS, from 1948 to 1970. To the viewer, ABC "nights"--meaning in TV jargon the nights the network swamps the ratings--are not much different from the other networks' fare. ABC's top shows are only too familiar comedies such as Happy Days and its offspring Laverne and Shirley, sci-fi fantasies like The Six Million Dollar Man, from whose stainless-steel rib was cloned the Bionic Woman, and a lineup of crime that includes Starsky and Hutch and S. W.A. T. ABC has placed at least four shows in the top ten since the start of the second season.

Infusions of Sex. Only a year ago the network was reeling from a disastrous 1974 in which all but four of 16 shows flopped. 1975 looked no better. A corporate reshuffle, however, brought to the presidency Frederick S. Pierce, 42, a 20-year ABC veteran with a background in research and advertising sales. Pierce, an unflappable backroom boy who had succeeded in every department, started scheduling for the fall with the courage of a man with little to lose. ABC'S strongest shows were tough cops-and-robbers epics (Streets of San Francisco, Baretta, S.W.A.T.). They could only be aired after the "family hour," from 8 to 9 p.m., when the networks schedule their hottest shows, usually comedies, hoping to capture an audience for the entire evening. Gambling that ABC could build an audience later in the evening, Pierce stripped in his proven dramatic shows throughout the week, and in the 10 p.m. shot spiced up such oldies as Marcus Welby, M.D. with infusions of sex. By midseason, he recalls, "half our shows worked, but we had serious problems in the 8-to-9 period." These evaporated as soon as ABC spun off Laverne and Shirley and Bionic Woman from its two most successful "family" shows and introduced another hit, the teeny-bopper variety show Donny and Marie. In February ABC was ready to capitalize on its new-found strength. Rich Man, Poor Man, a sexy twelve-hour serial that could turn into a series, was launched. Then Pierce delivered the coup de grace to his rivals: he made the Winter Olympics an eleven-day prime-time special. Sports President Roone Arledge's consummate showmanship and superb coverage grabbed a nightly 34 share of the audience and blunted the impact of CBS'S and NBC's new shows.

Programming, which owes more to water divining than logical analysis, is a team game. Last spring Pierce hired away from CBS its programming chief, Fred Silverman, the most experienced and successful tactician in the business. Ironically, it was Silverman who set up the CBS schedule against which ABC has done so well. It is too early to judge Silverman's real influence on programming. It was he who spotted the series potential of Laverne and Shirley, the two brewery workers on Happy Days, and suggested The Bionic Woman spinoff. Silverman's impact on ABC itself is obvious. Already the network exudes a No. 1 brand of confidence. Now the hot $m_ |f-entertainers want to be at ABC. More than 50 projects, including a new Norman Lear sitcom starring Nancy Walker and an evening soap by Agnes Nixon (All My Children), are being considered by Silverman in a familiar CBS pattern --no commitments, just a lot of promising developments.

By any canon of capitalism, a three-network market economy should inspire a better product. Television may explode that assumption. On the evidence so far, quality shows seem to have had a better chance of survival when only two networks were competitive. In the '60s, for example, NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies drew a share in the 40s, but CBS's The Defenders could still pull a strong 30 share. Now winner takes all with three networks in contention. The difference in price between an advertising minute on a top-rated show and its rivals is up to $100,000, and the other shows simply cannot attract big enough audiences. With the networks fighting over every hour, the instinct is to play safe. Programming has become one spin-off after another, either from a previous success or formats copied from British TV.

Revolving Door. ABC's coming of age as a contender is shaking up the industry. Claiming the largest audience of young adults of any network, ABC plans to concentrate on young performers rather than established stars and run shows on flexible, unorthodox schedules. -Says Pierce, "We plan to introduce new shows all year round, and we want to develop new dramatic forms." With the success of Rich Man, Poor Man, he plans more serials from novels, and is also experimenting with short series like the recent four-program Lola Falana Show that was aired each week in a different time slot.

This may be the last year there are two TV seasons; the trend is toward a continuous, revolving-door policy. By last fall network programmers were using an overnight rating system effectively enough to kill new shows like

Fay after a couple of airings; long-term commitments to series became vulnerable. Producers depend on eventual syndication sales, and such deals are profitable only with a minimum of 100 shows. Says Bruce Geller, producer of Mannix, "It's all very confusing at the moment. No one really knows what will or will not work. Maybe television will be a little more experimental--trying to serialize novels, produce adult soap-opera concepts in prime time--than has been the case in recent years." The question remains whether that, in turn, will lead to better programs.

-- Audience shares represent the percentage of households monitored by Nielsen that are tuned in to a given network. The Nielsen samples vary in size.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.