Room For One More?

By Richard Zoglin

Once upon a time, when television was young, there was a network known as DuMont. It was the home of Jackie Gleason and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and it broadcast the famous Army-McCarthy hearings in their entirety in 1954. But in 1955 it went out of business, and ever since, TV visionaries have dreamed of creating another commercial network to challenge the Big Three. A few half- hearted attempts have been made, but none have succeeded.

Enter Fox. That three-letter nickname may one day be as familiar to TV viewers as ABC, CBS and NBC. Right now it is short for Fox Broadcasting Co., the most ambitious effort yet to create a full-fledged fourth network. Financed by Australian-born Press Baron Rupert Murdoch (who in 1985 added 20th Century-Fox studios and the Metromedia chain of independent TV stations to his worldwide media holdings), Fox made its first foray into national programming in October with The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. Though Rivers' ratings in the battle against Johnny Carson have been disappointing, her determined parent company is now set to challenge the networks on the main stage. Next Sunday Fox will introduce its first two prime-time series, to be carried on 105 affiliated stations across the country. Three more programs will join the Sunday-night lineup in April and early May, and a two-hour block of Saturday- night shows will be in place by early June. They mark the first steps on a long march toward what, Fox executives say, will eventually be a weeklong slate of programming.

The fledgling network has assembled an impressive roster of Hollywood talent. At the top of Murdoch's entertainment conglomerate is Barry Diller, who was head of Paramount from 1974 to 1984, turning out such hits as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Flashdance. To run its program department, Fox raided NBC for a 29-year-old whiz kid named Garth Ancier. To create shows, it has enlisted such seasoned producers as James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Ed. Weinberger (Taxi) and Stephen J. Cannell (The A-Team).

What have they come up with? Nothing strikingly different, though a few shows depart slightly from the network cookie cutter. Married . . . with Children, one of the first Fox offerings, has the trappings of a typical sitcom but turns out to be a wicked assault on wholesome family shows. Another entry, The Tracey Ullman Show, stars the bouncy British singer-actress in half an hour of sketches, songs and variety acts, a mix that does not fit into current network pigeonholes.

Other series are less distinguishable from routine network fare. Duet, a half-hour romantic comedy, uses familiar sitcom contrivances to chronicle the relationship between a detective-story writer and a caterer. And Cannell's 21 Jump Street will spend an hour each week following the exploits of a group of undercover cops on the high school beat. Fox officials admit that much of this is hardly breakthrough material. "Have we reconceived the mousetrap? Do we feel any necessity to do so? No," says Diller. "But we will by definition take more risks."

The biggest risk may be Fox's uphill battle to stay in business. Many industry observers question the new venture's timing. The three networks' share of the over-all TV audience has dropped sharply, and advertising revenues are stagnant. Cutbacks, not expansion, seem the order of the day. "I don't see the logic of what Fox is doing," says CBS Entertainment President Bud Grant. "There may not be enough of an audience or sufficient advertising revenue to support three networks, let alone four."

In Murdoch's view, the industry's state of flux is an argument for going ahead. "Viewers have less and less loyalty to existing stations and networks," he says. "We have an opportunity to establish ourselves and win an audience." The key question, of course, is how big an audience. Though Fox owns powerful stations in such major cities as New York and Los Angeles, many of its affiliates are weaker UHF outlets. Fox is projecting an average rating of 6 for its prime-time shows, far less than the 16 or so that is usually a passing grade on the networks.

The Fox network can break even with such ratings, Murdoch says, partly because its operation is much leaner and more efficient. "The networks have overheads of the better part of a billion dollars. We have an overhead of 70 salaries," says network TV's newest mogul. Fox has devised other ways of helping the bottom line. Its shows, for instance, will include eight minutes of commercial time an hour, a minute more than on typical network counterparts. Ad time is selling briskly so far: 30-second spots originally priced at just over $30,000 are now going for about $45,000.

An admitted underdog, Fox is trying hard to attract attention. The two shows being introduced on Sunday, for example, will each be repeated twice during the evening, to encourage as many viewers as possible to sample them. And Fox is shrewdly starting up near the end of the networks' season; thus it will have new episodes for much of the summer while the competition is offering mostly reruns.

But industry observers predict that Fox's road to success will be long and hard. Most of the Hollywood community is publicly rooting for the newcomer (largely because it offers another market for programming), but privately, in the words of one producer, "skepticism is running very high. The money in this town is on failure." No one, however, is ready to dismiss Murdoch's bold venture. "It's well financed, it's well conceived, and it's got a guy with deep pockets," says Edward Atorino, media analyst at Smith Barney. Murdoch expects to spend $150 million over the next two years and does not anticipate making money for at least four years. "Sure, it's high risk," he says. "But it's high return. If we succeed, we're going to have an asset worth billions." And if not, a place in the trivia books next to DuMont.