Why Shows Live or Die

By Richard Zoglin

Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby may be gone, but who says network television will never be the same again? Every spring the familiar rituals are repeated: the well-hyped fall-season announcements; another batch of new shows competing for attention (a record-high 35 this season, when Fox is added to the Big Three); a fresh onslaught of optimistic projections from chipper network executives.

It's a tougher game than it used to be, however. The three networks' share of the TV audience showed a slight gain this past season, but the long-term trend has been down, down, down. To compete for a smaller pool of viewers, the networks are learning to live by a new set of rules.

1. Young viewers are better than old. The networks are increasingly looking for shows that appeal to the audience most valued by advertisers: young adults. Fox has spearheaded TV's youth movement with a string of hip young hits like The Simpsons, In Living Color and Beverly Hills, 90210. Joining them next fall will be such newcomers as Great Scott, about a daydreaming 15-year- old; The Class of '96, set in a small New England college; and The Heights, focusing on a fledgling rock band.

Now the other networks are catching youth fever. NBC is undergoing an almost complete face-lift, dumping several of its proven but aging hits (Matlock, In the Heat of the Night, Golden Girls) and repopulating its schedule with shows aimed at the magic 18-49 age group. Among the new entries: Here and Now, with former Cosby kid Malcolm-Jamal Warner as a graduate student working at a neighborhood youth center; Rhythm and Blues, about a white disk jockey at a black radio station; and The Round Table, featuring young law-enforcement professionals in Washington. "At eight o'clock across the board, we have a | demographic renaissance," programming chief Warren Littlefield told advertisers. "We're young and we're fun."

ABC -- which has been relatively young, and sometimes fun, for several years -- has added such shows as Hangin' with Mr. Cooper (a junior high teacher with two female roommates) and Camp Bicknell (a multi-kid household that is a hangout for neighborhood teens). Meanwhile, it is moving The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas's kid-oriented adventure series, to Monday nights, supplanting two older-skewing reality shows, FBI: The Untold Stories and American Detective. In fact, viewers over 50 have only two places left where they are really welcome: on CBS, which still has a healthy roster of older shows (Murder, She Wrote; Knots Landing) along with newcomers like Bob, the umpteenth Bob Newhart comedy; and on Saturday night, where stay-at-homes can flip between all three networks and find such anachronistic offerings as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (Jane Seymour as a doctor on the American frontier), Covington Cross (a medieval knight and his family) and Crossroads (Robert Urich traveling the country in a reprise of Route 66).

2. The duds you know are better than the duds you don't. The biggest surprise on the fall schedules is the number of shows that weren't canceled. Steven Bochco's drama Civil Wars, ABC's post-World War II soap opera Homefront, CBS's nostalgic sitcom Brooklyn Bridge, and NBC's family drama I'll Fly Away were all marginal performers in the ratings. But all will be back in the fall. They are upscale, critic-friendly shows that, the networks hope, could catch on with a little patience.

But the strategy is at least partly born of necessity. On the overcrowded TV dial, establishing new hits has become increasingly difficult -- and expensive. It is cheaper to try to build a following for an existing show than to start from scratch with a new one. Despite their unfashionable demographics, most of the oldies cast aside by NBC were picked up by other networks: Golden Girls (redubbed The Golden Palace) and In the Heat of the Night by CBS, and Matlock by ABC. "The main thing that guides the network schedules nowadays is the bottom line," says Joel Segal, an executive vice president of McAnn-Erickson advertising. "They're trying to save money, either by cutting the cost of programming or by reducing risk."

3. Let's make a deal. Another way of reducing risk is to depend on proven hitmakers. CBS and ABC in particular have signed a number of top creators to ! exclusive long-term deals. These favored producers not only are virtually assured of getting their shows on the air; they seem to have a lock on the best time periods as well. Diane English's new CBS comedy Love and War, for example, will have the all-but-foolproof spot following English's current hit, Murphy Brown. Hearts Afire, the new series from Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, will also get an enviable time period: after Bloodworth-Thomason's Evening Shade. Over at ABC, Tom Arnold's new sitcom The Jackie Thomas Show was surprisingly left off the fall schedule. But it has been promised a midseason spot, in the time period following -- what else? -- Mrs. Arnold's hit show, Roseanne.

Obviously, it behooves the networks to keep their valuable producers happy. But more and more, the shows picked for the schedule are the product of a complex web of commitments, promises and old-fashioned horse trading. Lorimar, the biggest supplier of programming to the three networks, loses a spot on ABC's Friday schedule (Perfect Strangers, shelved until midseason), but gains one (Hangin' with Mr. Cooper) on Tuesdays. Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the highly regarded producers of Roseanne and The Cosby Show, have their only CBS show canceled (Davis Rules), but get a new one (The Little Woman) as compensation.

Do the best shows make it on the air? Network programmers insist they do; viewers will have to wait until the fall to decide. But between demographics and dealmaking, the chance for diversity seems to be shrinking along with the network audience.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York