What network sinks? Simple, it's ABC By Beth Gillin
Tomorrow night, ABC, which has replaced Fox as the broadcast network everybody loves to hate, will air a very special episode of America's Funniest Home Videos. It's called "Nincompoop-a-rama."
The timing is less than fortuitous.
In recent weeks, the Disney-owned network has been beaten up for apparent cluelessness on several fronts.
Its ratings are down 20 percent from last year. And while it is sure to get a boost from tonight's Oscar telecast, it is locked in a battle with Fox for third place this season.
On the news-department side, it has been criticized for dissing veterans Ted Koppel and Barbara Walters, and for nudging Sunday morning pundits Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson toward the door.
Still, the news division, with Good Morning America and World News Tonight, is doing better than entertainment, which is plugging holes in its hit-deficient schedule with celebrity bloopers and homemade videos. In what looks like desperation, ABC will throw four new series - reality, drama, sitcom, hybrid - at the wall this week to see if anything sticks.
There's The Bachelor, Mondays at 9, in which a real single guy seeks a mate; the Sally Field-starring judicial drama The Court, Tuesdays at 10; the sitcom George Lopez, Wednesdays at 8:30; and the one about a fictional TV network in which people sometimes play themselves and sometimes don't, Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central), night and time self-explanatory.
"For a long time, the network was living on its old hits - Dharma & Greg and Drew Carey, The Practice and NYPD Blue," says Jonathan Estrin, dean of Drexel University's College of Media Arts & Design. "They weren't developing new shows, and then they did that thing with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that really hurt them.
"They were living off that show. It was like strip mining," says Estrin, who spent 30 years in Hollywood as a TV writer, director and producer.
Indeed, two years ago ABC was riding high, thanks to the phenomenal success of Millionaire, which premiered in August 1999 and quickly struck gold. It was the first prime-time game show to rivet the country since the 1950s, and it propelled the network into the top spot for the season. ABC might have seized an opportunity to use the show as a platform on which to build other hits. It didn't.
Instead, Millionaire became a life raft, which was scheduled four times a week in the 2000-01 season, and sent out as many as seven times weekly during sweeps. At first this kept ratings up, but in time the overexposure sank Millionaire - and ABC with it.
"ABC had a great show that covered for them for awhile. But it ran out of steam before the network could play catch-up," says Stacey Lynn Koerner, senior vice president and director of broadcast research for Initiative Media, a media planning and buying agency.
By last year, the alphabet network had fallen to second place, a hair behind CBS. Beginning Thursday at 9, Millionaire will get one airing a week.
In the meantime, viewers have fled in droves.
The latest figures from Nielsen Media Research show that for the week that ended last Sunday, ABC ranked fourth, behind NBC, CBS and Fox, among the 18-to-49-year-old viewers prized by advertisers.
ABC's dismal prime-time performance has spilled over onto its local station, WPVI. Once the most dominant local station in the country, it now faces a serious challenge from NBC-owned WCAU for supremacy in the 11 p.m. news battle, and has even lost viewers at 11 to CBS-owned KYW. Many ABC affiliates are in similar straits and have loudly demanded better lead-ins.
The network addressed the prime-time problem in January by promoting Susan Lyne, who last week told media buyers that the network's future could look a lot like its more popular past. Lyne became president of ABC Entertainment Group after developing acclaimed mini-series about Anne Frank and Judy Garland, and shepherding the Oprah Winfrey-produced telemovie Tuesdays With Morrie.
"We want to lift our network back into first place," Lyne said when she was promoted. "I don't do that with cheap stunts. That's not the way that I think we develop long-term success."
One measure of success is drawing young viewers. The pressure to get them explains why ABC tried so hard to woo David Letterman to the late-night time period that's been home to Koppel's Nightline for more than 20 years. Audiences for news shows always skew old.
Although Late Show With David Letterman is staying at CBS, ABC is now said to be courting The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, whose Comedy Central contract is up in January. No one at ABC Entertainment would comment on this. But Nightline appears to still be in play.
Although he wouldn't go into specifics, Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner said in a March 15 interview on CNN that ABC executives were still talking about "what [Nightline] is going to be and how long it is going to be."
If Koppel was blindsided, Barbara Walters was miffed when her 20/20 news program was evicted last fall from its Friday night home of almost 15 years. This was so Once and Again could stop in, like a visitor to a Motel 6, before returning to its former place on Mondays.
In moving Once and Again repeatedly, ABC was trying to save it. But that's not how it appeared to the show's loyal band of fans, especially after the show was yanked from the schedule for seven weeks. Viewers gave up looking for it, ratings went south, and cancellation is all but certain, despite devotees' noisy campaign to save it.
ABC also managed to tick off one of its few bona fide stars by demanding changes in a Drew Carey Show script he wrote that portrayed fictional airport-security screeners as - horrors! - incompetent. And the network came off as culturally insensitive when it dropped the ball on a 25th anniversary celebration of Roots, its landmark mini-series. A special marking the occasion was broadcast - but on NBC, after ABC passed on it.
As if all this weren't enough, Disney shareholders are displeased that ABC hasn't boosted the profits of its parent company. Disney stock sells for about $24, about the same price it commanded when Disney acquired ABC in 1995. (In that period, the Standard & Poor's 500 has gained about 50 percent.)
Many of ABC's problems were brought on by too few shows in the development pipeline, media analyst Koerner says.
"In the two years Millionaire was hot, the network never launched a new show coming out of it," she says.
Former hits such as NYPD Blue and Drew Carey have faded. The network had only two prime-time shows in Nielsen's Top 20 on last week's chart. Diane Sawyer's much-hyped Primetime Thursday interview with Rosie "I'm a lesbian" O'Donnell tied for seventh place. Reliable but aging law drama The Practice, ABC's only certified hit, placed 16th.
Another problem plaguing ABC is a lack of identity.
"Is it going to be Steven Bochco edgy? Or Disney family-friendly?" Koerner asks.
"You have to decide what your target audience is, and have a consistent philosophy about that audience," Estrin says.
There are some bright spots amid the gloom. ABC has a modest success in My Wife and Kids, and mild hits in Alias and According to Jim, all returning next season. Looking ahead, the network bought out analyst John Madden's contract at Fox so he could do Monday Night Football next year.
Estrin says that new entertainment boss Lyne "knows the value of marquee names - Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey - so I wouldn't be surprised to see names like Mel Gibson's above the titles of new shows. There definitely will be a pullback of reality programming. And ABC will develop a philosophy about the kinds of shows they want to put on the air."
They've already started. Meeting with media buyers last week, Lyne promised a revamped network this fall.
Lyne said there would be fewer game shows, more "fanciful dramas" (remember Fantasy Island?), and family-friendly comedies at 8 - "what traditionally made ABC a network." __ Philadelphia Inquirer (March 24, 2002)
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