The New York Times-20080126-Networks Ponder Poststrike Landscape
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Networks Ponder Poststrike Landscape
Full Text (1121 words)Scripts have been junked, pilots have been canceled, deals with writers have been wiped off the books, and almost no one in the television industry has been able to make any plans during the past three months.
In an industry where business as usual means nobody knows anything, the three-month-old (and counting) writers' strike has contributed a new state of uncertainty: Everybody knows even less.
What will television look like when the strike ends, and how is the next season going to be changed? Beyond the conviction that some scripted television series will be replaced by reality shows, network and production studio executives are expressing hope that one outcome of the strike will be a different, and much cheaper, process for getting scripted shows on the air.
That means more shows bought without pilots, more work from established writers and less from newcomers, and a rollout of new shows that extends throughout the year instead of being concentrated in September.
We have to find ways to be more efficient, said Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal. And a senior executive at a production studio said, The cost of business has just been unsustainable the past couple of years.
Mr. Zucker has been the most outspoken executive in declaring that the strike offers an opportunity to revise -- and potentially revitalize -- the business. He has suggested, for example, that NBC drastically cut back on its pilots (from dozens to five or six).
More decisions will be made to order a series based on the gut of the programmer, Mr. Zucker said in a telephone interview. He said networks would commit to shows from scripts alone.
NBC has struggled more than any other network in prime time over the past half-decade, but Mr. Zucker said he was encouraged by his network's success over the past two months. It has finished first or second in ratings among the advertiser-preferred 18-to-49-year-old audience six of the past seven weeks. Mr. Zucker said he believed his chief programming executive, Ben Silverman, has the gut we need.
Mr. Silverman himself has promised more shows based on existing formats, many purchased from foreign networks. He is also going back to an old practice known as the backdoor pilot, which involves producing a television movie that might later become a series. NBC will have one of those next month, a remake of the talking-car series Knight Rider.
Networks have always relied on pilots because they demonstrate how a series idea is going to be executed, and pilots can be shown to focus groups before a series is commissioned. Programmers, who have highly tenuous job security anyway, have been notoriously reluctant to base series decisions solely on their gut instincts.
Still, even some production studio executives support a shift in development from pilot-heavy to gut-heavy.
We can't do any worse than we've been doing, said the senior studio executive, who requested anonymity because the studio has restricted public comment on strike issues. There were no big successes this season. As always happens, networks generated dozens of pilots this season at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, only to see the vast majority scrapped like a pile of defective toys.
A senior executive at another production studio said, I think that for some networks, half as many pilots as usual will be ordered, and for others a quarter as many. The executive conceded that this would probably mean series creators with strong track records (meaning even one previous hit) would have an even better shot at getting new shows on the air than they do now, to the likely detriment of writers with less experience.
The networks will take fewer risks, the studio executive said. Would a show like a 'Seinfeld' get on the air in this system? Good question.
Cost is at the center of the drive to reduce the number of pilots, or at least to restore them to being television shows instead of mini-movies. Several executives pointed to the bloated costs of drama pilots, which have reached as high as $9 million, while episodes of the subsequent series cost only between $2 million and $3 million. Audiences then often decide that the regular episodes fail to live up to the pilot. One recent example: Bionic Woman, NBC's remake of an old series, which got off to a roaring start thanks to a film-quality pilot and never measured up again.
We're using pilots as sales tools, Mr. Zucker said. That has to stop.
But one studio executive, who also requested anonymity because of a ban on strike comments, suggested some caution.
Be wary of absolute assertions, the executive said, noting that the coming fall season already has two hugely expensive pilots on the books. Fox will soon begin production on a pilot called Fringe, an X-Files-like science fiction drama, with J. J. Abrams, a creator of Lost, as a writer and executive producer. The script was finished and sold before the strike started. The price to produce the pilot: $10 million.
CBS has commissioned an only slightly less expensive pilot version of a British television project called The 11th Hour (also an X-Files derivative) from the prolific producer Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI).
At the same time big-name producers continue to land commitments for new shows, less-credentialed writers have had their network deals wiped out in the past month. About 70 so-called overall deals to develop new series, most worth several million dollars a year, were canceled under a contractual clause called force majeure: networks cited the strike as the act of God that allowed them to erase those deals.
Some familiar names, like the actors Hugh Jackman and Taye Diggs, and the director John Singleton, had their agreements canceled. Other writers, like Jon Robin Baitz of ABC's Brothers & Sisters, Jonathan Lisco of K-Ville and Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green of The Sopranos also had lucrative development deals that were dropped.
With fewer pilots for fall, that may mean that first-year shows with uncertain futures, like ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, will have a better shot at surviving, while NBC warhorses like Law & Order and even Scrubs and ER may live another season.
One prominent talent agent said to watch for networks returning to old ways, however. The networks will most likely all go along with curtailing pilots and eliminating overall deals with writers, said the agent, who asked not to be identified, in order to not alienate the networks.
Then a network or two will have a gut failure and strike out with its new series. And then they'll all lose their minds again, the agent said.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Will Yun Lee and Michelle Ryan in NBC's Bionic Woman, which has faltered. (PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROL SEGAL)(pg. B13)