TNT

December 01, 2009
This article has been in the making for quite some time. TNT, once at the head of the pack for scripted drama on cable has been settling into a second place role to USA in the cable wars. This is something they’re obviously not too happy with and attempts to retake first place haven’t been going too well. What does the network have to do to reclaim its throne?

TNT had a lot of trouble finding a number two drama behind The Closer. In fact I’m not even really sure what they’re number two show is. They had a few shows that couldn’t follow The Closer’s magic including Wanted and Saved (which someone asked me about the other day). TNT has established a line-up that includes Raising the Bar, Hawthorne (I find the capitalized letters annoying), Dark Blue, Leverage, and Saving Grace (which will enter TV Hell soon). Its line-up is comparable in terms of quantity to USA’s but doesn’t fare as well in the ratings.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what part of the problem with TNT is. Its slogan of “We Know Drama” may attract some but can be offsetting to some who expect over the top dramatic series. In fact one of its newer shows Trust Me wasn’t particularly dramatic at all. Trust Me was given the axe but I thought it was one of the networks most original shows. USA’s slogan, “Characters Welcome”, works much better.

TNT’s new show, Men of a Certain Age, doesn’t look like it fits the We Know Drama bill though that’s not a bad thing. My only problem with it is it looks like Trust Me 2.0. It focuses on the relationship between a bunch of aging television stars and has comedic elements. Trust Me’s ratings weren’t horrible but it was shown the door anyway. I can’t see TNT giving Men of a Certain Age a fair shot when Trust Me wasn’t given a second season. TNT picked up Southland, which was stupidly cancelled by NBC. Hopefully Southland will be successful as it was one of NBC’s best new cop shows since Third Watch.

TNT became a serious contender in the cable wars a few years after USA and FX did. While it was blessed with instant success it takes time to build a lineup. The Closer is aging and TNT needs to establish a strong line-up to contend for years to come. Hopefully this involves ditching the We Know Drama slogan as it prevents them from reaching their full potential.

Thoughts About the Emmys

September 29, 2009
I don’t really try to hide the fact that I don’t like the Emmys very much. I think the Emmys has snubbed too many great cable shows (The Shield, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire to name a few). I thought I’d post my thoughts on this year’s results and what I liked about them. I’m not going to list them all because some of the wins weren’t very interesting so if you have any questions send them to ian@tvhell.net.

Hits:

Mad Men winning again: For me Mad Men’s second Emmy isn’t just a win for the show and AMC, it’s a win for cable. As I said earlier the Emmys have snubbed plenty of good cable shows so it’s nice to see the underdog get a victory.

Glenn Close: Glenn Close was robbed of an Emmy back in 2005 for the Shield. Even though she won last year for Damages she deserves it again. I don’t like how the exact same people from last year were nominated again though.

Michael Emerson: Michael Emerson saved Lost. There’s no question about that. Benjamin Linus is one of this decades greatest characters and it’s only fitting that he gets an Emmy for that.

Alec Baldwin: Alec Baldwin is hilarious on 30 Rock and he was clearly the best nominee this year for Best Actor.

Bryan Cranston: This is a marginal hit because I think Michael C. Hall deserves it too but it’s nice to see Breaking Bad bring home an Emmy.

Misses:

Lack of Variety: The Emmys added to the amount of nominees for each category but it was still pretty much the same nominees as last year. Nothing was really different and I’m not really surprised at all that both 30 Rock and Mad Men won again.

Toni Collette: I enjoy The United States of Tara but the Emmy belonged to Tina Fey. She worked her rear end off on 30 Rock and was hilarious as Sarah Palin on SNL. I know she already has an Emmy but she deserves another. So many other people had repeat wins and it’s a shame she didn’t join them.

The Amazing Race: Seriously? The Amazing Race has all seven Emmys that have come from the Outstanding Reality Competition category. This one should’ve gone to Top Chef.

I didn’t touch on everything so if you have question or comments you should send them to ian@tvhell.net.

AMC: The Little Engine that Could

August 23, 2009
AMC is one of the success stories that the major networks would die for these days. When I saw the 2009 Emmy nominations I was pretty shocked to see both of AMC’s original series listed under the Best Drama category. I wasn’t shocked because they don’t deserve it. I was shocked because the Emmys rarely reward cable channels other than HBO, part of the reason you don’t see much coverage of the Emmys on this site. AMC made history when Mad Men became the first basic cable show to win Best Drama and things have never been better for AMC.

If you asked me a couple years ago if I watched AMC I would tell you that the only thing that AMC was good for was a Clint Eastwood western on a lazy Sunday afternoon. That was true for the most part until 2006 when the movie channel purchased the rights to the British conman series Hustle. Hustle’s ratings were solid for an import (slightly better than A&E’s luck with MI-5) but the cabler was a long way away from USA, TNT, FX, or SyFy (still hate that name). AMC made headlines that year with the western mini-series Broken Trail, which was a ratings, hit but didn’t give AMC the original series it needed. 2007 was a better year however.

When I first heard about Mad Men I knew it was the perfect show for AMC. Mad Men’s 1960’s setting was perfect for a network that specialized in old movies and would definitely fit the demographic of the viewers they already had. The trouble was that AMC had no credibility as a producer of original series so Mad Men would have an uphill battle to find ratings. Fortunately critical support was there from the beginning and Mad Men captured last years Emmy for Best Drama. AMC had a hit.

AMC’s next series did not fit the mold that Mad Men established. Mad Men was controversial but you had to figure that out by watching the show. Breaking Bad however was controversial from the minute you saw the poster. Breaking Bad is Weeds meets The Wire and had me hooked from the first minute of the pilot. Breaking Bad has a lesser chance and taking the Emmy than Mad Men does but its every bit as deserving.

AMC is two for two with its original dramas and the future looks great. Its ratings aren’t as good as USA or TNT but it’s managed to do what they’ve done with their programming in a fraction of the time. I always like to watch out for what’s next with TV and I’m happy to see that AMC is here to stay.

Questions or comments as always can be sent to ian@tvhell.net remember my responses can be found on the Q&A page. I hope you all enjoyed your summer and let’s get ready for a great 2009 season.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis Wrap Up

July 02, 2009
Over the past month we’ve taking a look at the line-ups that the five networks have put out for this fall. We saw a lot of change in ratings in the first full season since the Writer’s Strike and quite frankly it wasn’t change for the better. NBC’s struggles were the most prominent but ABC and Fox also had their fair share of problems as well. The CW also took a dive after sending Smackdown! to My Network TV. The only network to not take big hits was CBS, which reclaimed its ratings crown even though a few of its veteran show lost a lot of viewers.

The one thing that really worries me about next year is the lack of promising rookie shows. Last year only four new shows really stood out and that’s not very good when you consider the small number of shows entering their sophomore year, which failed. The Mentalist, Fringe, Lie to Me, 90210, and Southland are the only new shows that really stood out last year and that’s a really small number. The networks are trying to play it safe at ratings are going to suffer. It’s kind of sad when the only new shows I’m really looking forward to are on The CW or on cable.

Barring any bizarre disaster this year is going to go to CBS. CBS may have sacked Without a Trace but it doesn’t have a single bad night of TV on its line-up. ABC is looking just as bad as NBC at this point. Grey’s and Desperate Housewives have seen declines and it’s failed to introduce any new hit dramas. Life on Mars really could’ve been something but instead they have to deal with Private Practice as its only drama that debuted in the past two years.

The network that has the most potential is The CW. The CW has been the butt of a million jokes in my headlines segment but I like its line-up for this fall. One Tree Hill should call it a day but it has a few promising new shows and some room for growth for its older shows.

I’ve said enough about NBC most of you probably already know how I feel. I won’t beat the dead horse (or peacock) any more than I already have.

Well there you go the 2009-2010 fall network TV analysis. Feel free to e-mail me at ian@tvhell.net with any questions or comments. Remember all responses are posted on my Q&A page. Since summer TV isn’t jammed packed with news I’m going to focus more time toward the What-If? Page. Readers are encouraged to e-mail their own what-ifs in as they make it a lot more fun for me to do.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: ABC:

June 30, 2009

Monday

8:00-10:00 pm – Dancing with the Stars
10:00-11:00 pm – Castle
Monday is a very winnable night for ABC. Dancing with the Stars faces very little competition from the other four networks and Castle should benefit from Leno on NBC. It’s nice to see Castle given a second shot and Monday can be the night that it finds an audience.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – Shark Tank
9:00-10:00 pm- Dancing with the Stars: Results Show
10:00-11:00 pm – The Forgotten
Not a big fan of this night. Shark Tank looks like a dumb reality show and The Forgotten looks like it will be forgotten come November. ABC hasn’t really done well with procedurals or sci-fi aside from Lost so this hybrid show doesn’t look promising.

Wednesday

8:00-8:30 pm – Hank
8:30-9:00 pm – The Middle
9:00-9:30 pm – Modern Family
9:30-10:00 pm – Cougar Town
10:00-11:00 pm – Eastwick
I’ve got to give ABC some credit for switching up their formula for Wednesdays but this line-up doesn’t look like a winning line-up. I can’t remember the last time five new shows were on one night and this line-up has a lot to prove. I don’t know why ABC would wait to put Scrubs on their line-up, as it would provide a veteran presence to this rookie line-up. We saw the line-up of Pushing Daises, Private Practice, and Dirty Sexy Money crumble last year and I fear the same thing will happen.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Flash Forward
9:00-10:00 pm – Grey’s Anatomy
10:00-11:00 pm – Private Practice
I’ve already said this year that I thought pairing 90210 and Melrose Place and NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles together was a bad move and I have to say the same for Grey’s and Private Practice. Bailing Private Practice out of the mess that was Wednesday night last year was a good short team move but I don’t think keeping it on Thursdays is a viable long-term solution. T.R. Knight is the latest departure for Grey’s and look to see some more ratings declines as age starts to affect the medical drama. Flash Forward reminds me of a show called Day Break, which aired a few years ago on ABC. Day Break bombed and I think Flash Forward will too.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Supernanny
9:00-10:00 pm – Ugly Betty
10:00-11:00 pm – 20/20
I think this will probably be Ugly Betty’s final year on TV but this is a solid Friday night line-up. Look to see some shows moved in here as Lost and some other midseason shows premier.

Sunday

7:00-8:00 pm – America’s Funniest Home Videos
8:00-9:00 pm – Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
9:00-10:00 pm – Desperate Housewives
10:00-11:00 pm – Brothers & Sisters
This is a good Sunday night line-up. Drea de Matteo is joining Desperate Housewives, which might help stop the ratings decline. I might have put Private Practice in the 10 o’clock slot since Desperate and Grey’s made a great team back in the day but it’s hard to make complaints about this night.

Overall ABC has put together a good line-up that isn’t going to win the ratings war. CBS has a better line-up and ABC has put too much faith in its rookie shows. With that being said it didn’t have much of a choice given the poor performances of last years shows. ABC can take second place if its Wednesday night line-up holds up until Lost gets back and if Thursday doesn’t lose any more ground.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: CBS:

June 19, 2009

Monday

8:00-8:30 pm – How I Met Your Mother
8:30-9:00 pm – Accidentally on Purpose
9:00-9:30 pm – Two and a Half Men
9:30-10:00 pm – Big Bang Theory
10:00-11:00 pm – CSI: Miami
Monday is a strong night for CBS and I don’t have any complaints. Accidentally on Purpose doesn’t look amazing but I don’t think How I Met Your Mother will lose any steam. Two and a Half Men and the Big Bang Theory both got multiseason renewals so it looks like this will be CBS’s Monday night comedy line-up for a while. CSI: Miami isn’t the show it once was but it doesn’t have much competition with Medium jumping ship to CBS.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – NCIS
9:00-10:00 pm NCIS: Los Angeles
10:00-11:00 pm – The Good Wife
NCIS’ continued success baffles me but it’s nice to see a spinoff on CBS that doesn’t have CSI in the title (thought if you rearrange some words it does). My only problem with this is that I don’t think the NCIS spinoff should be on the same night. I said this about The CW’s decision to pair 90210 and Melrose Place together as well. A couple years ago NBC paired L&O: Criminal Intent and SVU together on Tuesdays and while that is just one example I don’t think spinoffs should be partnered with their parent shows. The Good Wife looks like a promising legal drama but CBS has had bad luck with legal shows over the years so I don’t know how long this will last.

Wednesday

8:00-8:30 pm – The New Adventures of Old Christine
8:30-9:00 pm – Gary Unmarried
9:00-10:00 pm – Criminal Minds
10:00-11:00 pm – CSI: NY
I’m not jumping out of my seat over this night but I’ve criticized the other networks for their Wednesday selections so CBS has at least done something right. Old Christine has lost some steam and I don’t like Gary Unmarried but Criminal Minds and CSI: NY have both performed very well on Wednesdays.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Survivor: Samoa
9:00-10:00 pm- CSI
10:00-11:00 pm – The Mentalist
Moving the Mentalist to Thursdays was an interesting move and I think it was a good one. CSI has lost some ratings since it ruled Thursdays with Without a Trace but The Mentalist is as good a replacement as I can think of. The Mentalist was last year’s highest rated rookie drama and it should keep the ratings up behind the Laurence Fishburne lead CSI.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Ghost Whisperer
9:00-10:00 pm - Medium
10:00-11:00 pm – NUMB3RS
I love CBS Fridays. A few years ago I said Ghost Whisperer was going to bomb and I’m pleasantly surprised that I was wrong. Medium is a great fit for this night and NUMB3RS should continue to deliver. The only question that remains is what will happen to Canadian import Flashpoint when it returns. Flashpoint delivers great ratings for its price (something like $350,000 making it arguably the best deal in TV) so CBS would be stupid to get rid of it. We’ll worry about that problem when we get there.

Sunday

7:00-8:00 pm – 60 Minutes
8:00-9:00 pm – The Amazing Race
9:00-10:00 pm – Three Rivers
10:00-11:00 pm – Cold Case
Good but not great Sunday. The Amazing Race is past its prime and Three Rivers looks like a waste of the talent of Alex O’Loughlin. It’s nice to see Cold Case back but I’ll miss Without a Trace. CBS has all the pieces it needs to win the ratings battle this year. I’m not impressed with the crop of new shows save for NCIS: Los Angeles but I like that Medium has jumped ship. Fox and ABC are weak and NBC has basically given up the ratings war so CBS should easily take the crown.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: FOX:

June 09, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – House
9:00-10:00 pm – Lie to Me
Prison Break’s cancelation turns Monday into what appears to be Fox’s strongest night pre-idol. If Lie to Me can hold on to the audience it built last year than this should be a good night.

Tuesday

8:00-10:00 pm – So You Think You Can Dance (Performance Show)
I don’t see So You Think You Can Dance winning anything on this night. Moving Fringe to Thursdays was a mistake.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – So You Think You Can Dance (Results Show)
9:00-10:00 pm – Glee
Glee was bad, really bad. This coupled with the results show of a dance show that fewer and fewer people actually care about doesn’t bode well for Wednesdays.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Bones
9:00-10:00 pm – Fringe
This is a good night but it’s not the night I would’ve put together. Assuming I kept every show on the line-up I would’ve moved Fringe and Dollhouse to Tuesday and moved SYTYCD to Wed/Thurs as opposed to Tues/Wed. Supernatural and Smallville did really well for awhile together on Thursdays so there’s no reason to think that Fringe and Dollhouse wouldn’t benefit from a partnership.

Friday

8:00-8:30 PM: Brothers
8:30-9:00 PM: 'Til Death
9:00-10:00 PM: Dollhouse
I’m happy that Fox renewed Dollhouse but I’m not happy about the timeslot. There’s really no reason to think that Dollhouse’s ratings will go up that much if you don’t give it a shot. As for the comedies, I’m not a big fan of Friday comedy but I’m not complaining either.

Sunday
7:00-8:00 PM: THE OT (NFL post-game)
8:00-8:30 PM: The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 PM: The Cleveland Show
9:00-9:30 PM: Family Guy
9:30-10:00 PM: American Dad

Sundays are Sundays for Fox. Animation domination as they call it. King of the Hill finally bit the dust and even though I would’ve switched the timeslots of American Dad and The Cleveland Show I’m ok with this night. Fox switches its whole line-up mid season to accommodate the return of American Idol so this line-up isn’t really set in stone. This isn’t a good enough line-up to give Fox the ratings war but it’s better than NBC’s and The CW’s.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: NBC:

June 02, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – Heroes
9:00-10:00 pm – Trauma
Trauma is a new show about paramedics in San Francisco. Doesn’t look like it will last long but hopefully NBC can salvage what’s left of Heroes, which has a really terrible finish to last year. Heroes doesn’t look like it will be a good lead in for Trauma so this night is so-so.

Tuesday

8:00-10:00 pm – The Biggest Loser
I don’t like this night at all. The Biggest Loser isn’t bad enough to banish completely but NBC should’ve put this one on Friday. Southland and Law & Order: SVU would’ve been my pick for Tuesday night but then again I’m not one of the executives who sent this network into the ground.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – Parenthood
9:00-10:00 pm – Law & Order: SVU
Parenthood looks like it could be a hit for NBC but then again Wednesdays at 8 don’t seem to work out for the Peacock. Law & Order: SVU takes the spot that I thought would go to the original but this isn’t the worst night on the line-up.

Thursday

8:00-8:30 pm – SNL Thursday (briefly) Community (after a few weeks)
8:30-9:00 pm – Park & Recreation
9:00-9:30 pm – The Office
9:30-10:00 pm – 30 Rock
Say what you will about My Name is Earl it was a good leadoff show to start the night. Community has big shoes to fill in the timeslot that shows like Friends and The Cosby Show once occupied. Other than that it looks to be a good night.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Law & Order
9:00-10:00 pm – Southland
Bad night. I’m not surprised that Law & Order is here but Southland deserved a better chance than being sent to the death slot. The Biggest Loser should’ve aired on this night.

Sunday
8:00-whenever pm – NFL Sunday Night Football

Not much to say about this one. Football will probably get better ratings than any two nights on this line-up combined Chuck will be back later this year. If you read my mock line-up I made a couple months ago you’ll see that while I got most of the shows that were coming back correct I mixed up the order. NBC isn’t going to capture first place this year but maybe it can probably live to die another day.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: The CW:

May 22, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – Gossip Girl

9:00-10:00 pm – One Tree Hill

Well this night is poised for disaster. Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton are not returning to One Tree Hill. After six seasons of so so ratings I think The CW should’ve given One Tree Hill the axe instead of bringing back something the fans don’t want to see. Gossip Girl doesn’t have much margin for error but I think it’ll do all right.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – 90210

9:00-10:00 pm – Melrose Place

This night has potential but pairing the two sibling shows together is not a move I would’ve done. 90210 and Melrose Place are bound to attract the same fan base and two hours in a row might be more than they can handle.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – America’s Next Top Model

9:00-10:00 pm – The Beautiful Life
I would’ve flip flopped this night with Thursday’s line-up because ANTM is losing fuel and The Beautiful Life will probably be the new show to go on The CW. Melrose Place and The Vampire Diaries will both be given more time to blossom that The Beautiful Life will so throwing it into Thursdays might’ve been smarter.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – The Vampire Diaries

9:00-10:00 pm – Supernatural

I like this night a lot. The Smallville/Supernatural combo was one of the few positives things I had to say about The CW. With that being said both of them can survive on their own so splitting them up made sense. I’ll say this right now The Vampire Diaries is going to be this year Gossip Girl. Vampire series are very popular right now and The CW made a smart move picking this over the Gossip Girl spinoff.
Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Smallville

9:00-10:00 pm - ANTM encore

With the cancellation of Everybody Hates Chris ANTM is the final show from UPN to still be around. This will likely be Smallville’s last year but it should do ok on Fridays. Since The CW gave up on Sundays I would’ve liked to see them air a 9:00 Friday show.

Overall this is The CW’s strongest line-up since its first year. All three of its new shows have potential to be hits and they made the right calls with their renewals (minus One Tree Hill). I don’t expect much from them this year but The CW might grow a bit in the ratings.

Why Jay Leno Will Ruin NBC:

April 30, 2009
This article is long overdue. I avoided the Leno bashing originally because I had hope that NBC would reverse the stupidity. Then I made my mock line-up (which appears to be accurate so far) and avoided it again because I was sick of dealing with the peacock network. But quite frankly I’ve been looking at the ratings these past couple of weeks and there is nothing there to suggest that this move will do anything but wreck NBC.

Jay Leno is my favorite late night host and I was sad to hear he was leaving back in 2004. I named my Headlines section after his although the content of the two are nothing alike. The Tonight Show is the highest rated late night show but those ratings don’t translate into winning numbers in the 10 o’clock slot. If anything NBC can hope for a not so distant third place on every night but Friday where it has an outside shot at second. Even if Leno’s new program doubles its current ratings, which is a very unrealistic scenario, he still doesn’t win the night.

Let’s look at NBC’s logic for making this decision. The move is a cost cutting move but it’s also a move that is likely to damage NBC’s profits. NBC’s two top rated dramas, Law & Order: SVU and Southland, both air in the 10 o’clock slot. Medium, Law & Order, and the second hour of The Celebrity Apprentice all perform above the networks average. The eight and nine o’clock slots are much more competitive and eliminating its best timeslots will most likely bring its average to a little bit above The CW’s. That’s a pretty big drop from the network that used to be number one less than two years ago.

Over the course of TV’s long history, NBC has been home to many of the greatest shows to ever air on TV. Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, Fraiser, ER, Law & Order, Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, Homicide: Life on the Street, L.A. Law, St. Elsewhere, and The West Wing all called NBC home. That’s a lot of Emmy winners and without NBC; TV simply wouldn’t be the same. This move is not going to work and I don’t think anyone wants to see NBC go under. We already saw UPN and The WB make a pretty unsuccessful merger and while this is less extreme big format changes rarely work. NBC is in big trouble if this move doesn’t work and there’s no doubt in my mind that it won’t.

The Decline of the Genre Specific Network:

April 25, 2009
Those of you who read Headlines have seen two genre specific cable networks drop their format in these past few weeks. Cartoon Network will begin to air live action programming and while the Sci-fi Channel will phonetically sound the same it will now be spelt SyFy. TV Land has been advertising TV Land Prime, a new slate of reality shows coupled with the fact that their definition of what is classic TV is questionable at best. They’re not the only nets to drop their format though. AMC (American Movie Classics) and G4 brought in programming that didn’t fit the type of programming they were known for. The most famous example of format dumping is MTV, which even went so far as to remove TRL from its line-up. So why is the genre specific network failing.

To be fair AMC still shows old movies, Cartoon Network still airs cartoon, TV Land still airs The Brady Bunch, and G4 still airs tech shows. The cable market has been growing and growing and most of the cable networks don’t want to limit themselves to a certain genre. I think it’s worth noting that Viacom owns TV Land, MTV, VH1, BET, and Spike which all genre specific channels or channels with specific targeted demos. While the major networks also have targeted demographics, (ABC goes after women more than NBC and NBC’s audience tends to be wealthier than Fox’s) they try to broaden their horizons. Look at how many dramas came to ABC that had striking resemblances to Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy following their success. People don’t want to see the same thing over and over again.

I don’t have a problem with networks like Spike since all channels have target demographics even though some are less obvious than other. I don’t have a problem with MTV ceasing to air music videos anymore. Building a line-up that focuses on one thing alienates a lot of potential viewers. Look at AMC’s success after abandoning the only old movies format. Mad Men won an Emmy and Breaking Bad is also critically acclaimed and I’ve received e-mails about it as well. Breaking the format pays off.

If you check in the TV Hell archives you can see what I thought the cable wars would be like three years ago. Competition fuels the battle and when the networks are forced to compete we get quality programming in return. We’re seeing fewer and fewer cable primetime movies and for those of us with all the premium channels that’s a good thing. Rescue Me, Burn Notice, Mad Men, and South Park are a few of my favorite shows and as the cable networks turn away from genre specific programming to allow any show on their line-up, we’ll begin to see more shows like Mad Men.
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Serialized Dramas:

April 18, 2009
The Prison Break finale is in a few weeks and while I didn’t feel it was worthy enough of its own tribute article I think the circumstances of its cancellation are worth noting. Serialized dramas are taking a pretty hard beating and while Prison Break may be the only long running casualty, many of the top serialized dramas are suffering big ratings drops. ABC has already axed four serialized dramas (Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Pushing Daisies, and the recently axed Life on Mars)

Prison Break is a pretty bad example of a failing serialized drama because the show should never have continued past two seasons. Prison Break’s first season was fast paced and exciting and season two also had a lot of great moments. However the show quickly lost steam and seasons three and four were pretty disappointing. It didn’t help that Prison Break suffered from a ailment that has hurt Lost, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, 24, and Grey’s Anatomy. It wasn’t appealing to new viewers.

Most successful long running shows experience declines in ratings as they got older but none of them experienced ratings drops as quickly as the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph (24 excluded as its been pretty consistent). The 90s didn’t have Tivo, Itunes, Hulu, or a painful writer’s strike but if you compare the top twenty most watched shows every week with their 90s counterparts you won’t see huge changes aside from the top five. Dramas like ER that bring in thirty million a week don’t exist anymore but the rest of the top 20 is more or less consistent with top 20s in years past. Shows like ER and CSI reigned supreme for years though and we’re not seeing that with the hits today. Heroes, Grey’s, and Desperate Housewives all had a couple years to go before seeing ratings drops as big as the ones we’re dealing with now.

Fast paced shows are fun but they can alienate viewers pretty quickly if too much happens. I can’t find a single person besides myself who can name half of the unsolved mysteries on Lost and that’s hurt its fan base. Big ensemble casts are fun but if too much is going on at the same time people are going to get lost and turn it off. Serialized dramas on cable such as Mad Men, Damages, and Rescue Me are doing great in the ratings because they don’t try and introduce more storylines than the viewer can handle. I don’t mean to offend anyone since most of the people who go on this site are more interested in TV than the average viewer but shows suffer if the average viewers tunes out.

The average lifespan of a drama that survives its first two years is between 7-11 seasons. At the rate Heroes is going I don’t think it’ll reach five. To quote a popular Bob Dylan song “These Times They Are a-Changin” and the TV world is no exception. Serialized dramas are in trouble and need to figure out a way to keep their viewers. There’s nothing wrong with procedural dramas but I don’t think people want primetime to become even more engulfed in them than it already is. I know I don’t .

Canadian Television:

March 23, 2009
I just read recently that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is moving forward with production of 18 to Life, a sitcom that was originally co-produced by ABC. While this might seem unimportant, it’s pretty relevant given how many Canadian shows have gone south of the border these past couple years. Flashpoint, which was produced by CTV was picked up by CBS over the summer and was at one point the most watched show in America. Given the reduced number of pilots being produced, Canada is bound to have a larger presence on American television in these next couple of years.

While finding a Canadian television series that airs is America is pretty rare, American TV shows are frequently filmed in Canada. Shows like Stargate SG-1, Supernatural, MacGyver, Battlestar Galactica, and the first couple season of The X-Files are all filmed in Vancouver. While this is purely speculative, I’ve heard from numerous sources that Vancouver more or less has the same resources that LA has for filming and includes discounts on filming and generally has a government that welcomes people to come in and film there. Obviously this has to be at least partially true or else there wouldn’t be a large presence of American shows filmed there.

I didn’t write this article to give you a list of shows that are filmed in Canada. I wrote it because ever since the Writer’s Strike, Canadian TV is making its presence known in America. It isn’t just Due South anymore, (Due South was a Canadian produced show ironically set in Chicago that was a modest hit for CBS in the 90s). Networks are reducing the number of pilots they order each year. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that the number of quality pilots will go up in fact it reduces the chances that that will happen. Instead of throwing million of dollars into pilots networks and cable nets are putting foreign produced shows on the air at a much reduced price.

Canada is just about the only country where this could work. It’s close by, the people don’t have accents (if you know what I’m talking aboot), and our cultures are pretty similar. The UK’s culture is much different from our own and obviously Mexico doesn’t work unless it’s for Telemundo. Flashpoint has been a pretty big hit for CBS and I think its safe to say that more shows will keep coming. Competition is key for success and if the number of pilots being produced is down, an outside source has to be called in to keep the competition going.

E.R.:

March 13, 2009
A tribute article to ER shouldn’t be too surprising to my longtime readers. We’ve said goodbye to The Shield and we’ll say goodbye to Battlestar Galactica soon but they’ve saved the best for last this year. After 15 seasons ER will be going off the air.

The Must See TV Thursday Night line-up had a simple formula. Four comedies and one drama and for its 24 years under that name things were pretty good. Some say it was because of The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, or Friends that the line-up was such a juggernaut force. While this my be true, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and ER anchored the line-up and consistently put the competition to rest while closing out a great night of TV. Must See TV is no more but its legacy will live on, as will ER’s.

It’s hard to believe the same man who created Jurassic Park created ER but it was through Michael Crichton’s mind that both were hits. ER came to NBC in 1994 where it was expected to replace L.A. Law as the anchor of the Must See TV Line-up. This was no easy task but with Steven Spielberg’s support ER’s first season garnered 28 million viewers, second place overall. ER would finish first as the most watched show in America three times and finished in the top ten another eight times.

Even though ER had some geniuses calling the shots behind the camera, it was its cast that made the magic happen. George Clooney, Julianna Marguiles, Eriq La Salle, Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, and Sherry Stringfield made up the shows first seasons cast. It’s interesting to note that while Stringfield left in season three (she would return in season eight), Clooney’s five-season tenure was the shortest of the original cast members. I can’t name many successful dramas that can say that. While Wyle’s departure in season eleven meant that no originals were still with the show, Laura Innes, Goren Visnjic, Maura Tieney, and Alex Kinston would all star on the show for many years.

I can’t name a single other show who has had more famous guest stars (SNL excluded) than ER. Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Dan Cheadle, Alan Alda, James Woods, and Zac Effron are just a few of the many guest stars who entered the emergency room of the County General Hospital in Chicago.

ER is historic in many ways, but above all else it should be remembered for its final season. Assuming Springfield does appear in the finale, ER will have had every original cast member return for the final year, no easy feat for a show that has been on the air for fifteen years. Hopefully ER’s final season will be used as a rubric for all long running shows to follow, as I can’t think of a more perfect way to close out a show.

It’s sad to see ER go off the air but I think all the fans can agree that ER left the air with as much dignity as when it had when it arrived. The show’s 123 Emmy nomination including 22 wins (likely to change after this year) as well as its Peabody award speak for themselves. All good things must come to an end but let’s hope they all come to an end like ER has.

Shows that are On The Bubble:

March 04, 2009
I was going to wait a couple weeks to do this but the cancellation of Life on Mars by ABC today convinced me to start this early. This year has been a weird year since we not only have rookie shows looking for a pickup but sophomore shows that were given a second chance for this year without proving themselves, thanks to the Writer’s Strike. I’m going to go network to network listing the shows on the brink of cancellation and their odds at renewal. I’m not going to list shows that are definitely renewed so if you have a question about a show not listed send me an E-mail at ian@tvhell.net or you can check Headlines where I typically list renewals.

CBS

ABC

NBC

Fox

The CW

NBC’s Lineup for 2009-2010:

March 02, 2009
As most of you probably know already, NBC has given Jay Leno the 10 o’clock slot Monday-Friday. This of course means that five fewer shows will either be back or premier next year. While I don’t agree with this decision at all I realize that there’s nothing I can do to change it so I compiled a mock line-up for NBC for next year. This line-up does not reflect what NBC has decided on but should give all of you a good idea about what to expect. If there are multiple shows listed in one slot that means it’s pretty much up for grabs with the first one listed are the most likely choice. Kings and Southland haven’t premiered yet either so the inclusion of them in this list if 100% pure speculation.

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – New show/Chuck/Kings or Southland
9:00-10:00 pm – Heroes
If I had to bet I would say that Chuck gets moved to Fridays if it comes back. However that would require NBC to take a risk, something I’m not sure they’ll do. Heroes hasn’t been performing this year but I doubt that NBC will cancel it especially since Bryan Fuller has rejoined the staff. As for Medium, expect it back midseason.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – The Biggest Loser
9:00-10:00 pm – Law & Order: SVU
I’m 99% confident that this will be the Tuesday night line-up. I can’t imagine anything else that would be on.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – New show
9:00-10:00 pm – Law & Order
My guess is that NBC will air two new dramas next year and the 8 pm Wednesday slot is probably going to be one of them. Knight Rider and Life are pretty much surefire cancellations and unless Southland or Kings both make it to next year there’s going to be something new at 8. As for 9 o’clock, some may disagree with me but I don’t think NBC is going to cancel Law & Order the same year we say goodbye to ER. ER has had such a great final season that I don’t think Law & Order will go without a similar final year that includes several faces from the past.

Thursday

8:00-8:30 pm – My Name is Earl
8:30-9:00 pm – Parks and Recreation/New show
9:00-9:30 pm – The Office
9:30-10:00 pm – 30 Rock
3/4th’s of Thursday’s line-up is already set in stone as Earl, The Office, and 30 Rock have all been renewed. I’ve heard rumors about Kath & Kim being renewed but I don’t see that happening at all. Parks and Recreation has been heavily hyped these past couple of weeks so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was brought back. Its renewal would likely mean no new comedies on the fall roster but NBC usually brings one in around springtime anyway.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Chuck
9:00-10:00 pm – New show/ Kings or Southland
Ok, this is basically complete guessing. However, Chuck can be considered a cult TV show and cult TV has always faired better on Friday’s than other shows. As for the 9 pm slot I’m praying its not Kings because Ian McShane is one of my favorite actors (no not because we share the same first name). Judging by the commercials, Kings is a dark drama, which would make it fodder for a 9 pm slot, and I’m pretty confident that every other 9 pm slot will go to the shows I listed.

Sunday
8:15-whenever pm – NFL Football (starring John Madden, the worst commentator I’ve ever heard)

No questions asked about this one, unless you disagree about Madden. The spring line-up is far away but don’t be surprised if Medium gets relegated here.

ER’s final season made making the line-up a bit easier but this seems to be the end of the line for Life, Knight Rider, and Kath & Kim. Any questions or comments about the line-up send me an e-mail at ian@tvhell.net and remember all replies are put in my Q&A page, which can be accessed via the link at the top of this page.

The Future of Cancelled/Ended Shows:

February 21, 2009
Last Tuesday brought an interesting new release to the shelves. Dead Like Me, a dramedy on Showtime that aired from 2003-2005 was resurrected in the form of a direct to DVD movie. This isn’t the first time that this has happened but with talks of movies based on Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, and Battlestar Galactica floating about, people are going to ask the question can ended or cancelled sows be resurrected?

Before I go any further let me point out that the odds of any show continuing past its finale whether it be spinoff or movie are very slim. However, the exceptions to the odds have all been for the most part in the past few years. If the Serenity, the feature length film based off of the Fox show Firefly had been a box office hit I bet we’d see more shows brought back. Serenity was a success on the DVD market and I’m sure that had something to do with the recent Highlander movie, Babylon 5: The Lost Tales and the Dead Like Me movie. The DVD market has proven to be more viable than the TV movie market has. Ask Chuck Norris how the last Walker Texas Ranger movie did, and that was before CBS did away with movie block. Broadcast networks are the only TV channels with the resources to make a good TV movie based on a past TV series happen and in this era of TV there isn’t any room for them. TNT may have been able to produce The Librarian Trilogy but that was done mostly using unknown or unpopular actors. A TV movie featuring the cast of Friends would never be produced on any network other than NBC (and yes I understand that a Friends movie would most likely be released in theatres I was just making a point).

I brought up the box office failure of Serenity for a reason. This new market of brining old shows back for another adventure is not proven to be successful by any means. That means that we the fans must give a little to the studios to show that we care. My policy of only buying TV DVD’s at 40% off or higher or on eBay for prices that I assure you are mind blowing has allowed me to acquire a rather large collection of them. This past Tuesday I went out and bought Dead Like Me: Life After Death for full price. Why would I do that? MGM went out on a limb and made a movie about a show nobody ever though would make a comeback and I wanted to show him or her I cared enough to buy the movie. There aren’t going to be any more movies if everyone waited a year to buy them at half price. Fox took a big gamble with its Futurama DVD movies and the fans came out and supported the show, which had been off the air for four years. For those fans out there who don’t like Sci-fi but want to see episodes of their favorite shows back, make your voice heard. Studios are really reluctant to spend money on unproven pilots these days so the time is now to act if anyone ever wants to see a Sopranos movie or something like that.

I don’t expect any of you to go out and buy movies you don’t want. If there are any Dead Like Me or Futurama fans out there, you have to lend your support to see DVDs like this made. Life after death for shows that remain unforgotten in TV Hell can happen but the support has got to be there.

My Network TV: A Victim of the Economy?:

February 17, 2009
If you haven’t heard already, the execs at My Network TV have announced that they will stop producing original programming for the network save for Friday Night Smackdown! Smackdown’s arrival on the network as well as its failed attempt to bring telenovas to primetime are really the only two relevant things in My Network TV’s short existence which explains why it is rarely mentioned on this site. Most new networks have spend years trying to build a line-up so it wasn’t really surprising that My Network TV didn’t take off in its first couple of years. The decision to abandon ship less than three years after its debut is unheard of, which leads me to believe that the economy is the reason My Network TV is closing up shop.

HBO, Showtime, UPN, USA, MTV, VH1, FX, Bravo, Sci-fi, TNT, and I’m sure a lot more all have one thing in common. They all took time to take off to the success stories that they are now. I included UPN on that list and while it may not be around anymore, UPN successfully reinvented itself from its original format which focused mainly on Sci-fi and action adventure. After years of being known for nothing besides Star Trek and for picking up other network scraps like Buffy and Roswell, UPN switched its target demographic to women and African Americans where it produced some very successful comedies which helped turn the tide in its battle with the WB. HBO is known more for The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Sex and the City than it is for Tales from the Crypt and Arliss. Showtime has been featured in the news for Dexter and Weeds but most people forget earlier shows like Soul Food and Jeremiah.

The point I’m trying to make by talking about the pasts of UPN and HBO is that both networks took many years before they gained exposure. The ratings success that ABC and CBS have enjoyed over the past couple years was a result of many years of piecing together a solid line-up. No network just popped into existence and has had any immediate success, look at The CW. I don’t think the executives at My Network TV are stupid (I could be wrong), so the only reason I can think of for My Network TV’s demise is that funding for a revamp of the network fell through. My Network TV had a good thing going these past couple months and Friday Night Smackdown! was a great building block for the rest of the line-up. Instead My Network TV will focus on airing movies and reruns of Law & Order Criminal Intent. I don’t see this format as permanent because sooner or later another revamp is inevitable. Until then My Network TV will serve as an example of the effect of the economy on TV. Pilots for next year are being described as “conservative” and big budget shows like Lost and 24 are bound to be scaled back. This isn’t exactly fun coming off of a horrible writer’s strike but I hope the TV industry can get its bearings.

Battlestar Galactica:

February 08, 2009
I gave The Shield the honor of its own tribute back in November for I felt that it had made a big impact on television. I will now give the same honor to Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica has a lot in common with The Wire. Critics couldn’t get enough of them and both of them have been snubbed at the Emmys and Golden Globes throughout their runs. This article isn’t about that though, its about honoring Battlestar Galactica, one of the greatest shows of this decade which will conclude its run on the Sci-fi Channel in a couple of weeks.

Battlestar Galactica began as a miniseries in 2003, which was a remake of the short, lived Battlestar Galactica in 1978. Aside from the some of the characters and ships names and the presence of Richard Hatch as Tom Zarek the reimagining shared little in common with its predecessor (not immediate predecessor due to the short-lived spinoff Galactica 1980).

From episode one the new Battlestar Galactica was different from pretty much every other sci-fi show that ever aired on TV. The comic relief present in the other two shows tat aired as part of Sci-fi Friday, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis was absent and the tone was noticeably darker than any other show I’d seen in a long time. The term space opera doesn’t really quite cover the entire spectrum of the shows dark and violent nature. The show turned Cylons into humanoids, adding a whole new dimension to the battle of man vs. machine. Space battles were still there but it was the shows dialogue between the characters that really defined the series. Galactica’s character development including the maiming of a few characters has been relatively unheard of in the sci-fi world.

Science fiction on TV is a lot like knuckleball pitchers in baseball. There are never going to be a lot of them but they are never going to become extinct. After Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled, ending the 18-year run of Trek on TV; I was worried about the future of the genre. Stargate SG-1 and Charmed carried the torch for little while but the success of Galactica did a lot for the genre, certainly more than the last Trek did. With Galactica ending, Heroes and Lost are really the only “hit” sci-fi shows on TV right now unless you want to count Supernatural, Smallville, Eureka, or Legend of the Seeker, none of which are that big. Battlestar Galactica’s spinoff Caprica will premiere sometime in the next year or so but who knows if it’ll be up to par with its predecessor. Regardless of how good it is, it doesn’t change the impact that Battlestar Galactica has made on TV and I encourage you all to check out one the best shows that’s been around the past couple years.

USA: The Underrated Cable Network:

January 26, 2009
I’ve often said that the Cable Big Three is FX, TNT, and USA, a term defined in our dictionary on the main site. Since I wrote that a couple of years ago we’ve seen AMC, A&E, and TBS join in the cable battle and Comedy Central and Sci-Fi channel retain their relevance in the “cable wars”. With all the attention being directed toward AMC for its Emmy win, FX for The Shield’s finale, and TNT for its ratings success, people have really let USA slip under the radar in terms of exposure.

USA Network has been in the first run programming business for years with shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Highlander: The Series, Duckman and Forever Knight, but USA Network began gaining exposure in 2002 with its new programs Monk and The Dead Zone. Monk was a huge critical success and earned Tony Shalhoub three Emmy’s. Both shows served as the core of USA’s lineup, which was joined by The 4400, Kojak, and Psych with the latter still airing today. Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, and the Starter Wife have joined the line-up in recent years and all have been successes for the network. USA also airs WWE Monday Night Raw which gets around five million viewers a week.

USA has brought in the ratings but with the exception of Monk, has never been a big contender at the mainstream awards shows. While cable as a whole doesn’t have a big presence at the Emmy’s, FX and TNT have been big names at the Emmys and Golden Globes in recent years yet for the most part USA Network goes unnoticed. The ratings are comparable so why don’t the voters acknowledge USA’s programming.

I recently recommended Burn Notice to a friend. He described the show as “fun”, a term I have avoided using because it implies that the rest of my shows are not fun to watch but the term applies to a lot of USA’s programming. Burn Notice is an entertaining spy show that deals with problems without “compelling drama”. Burn Notice and Psych inject a fair amount of comedy into their programming which may confuse voters as to where to put them. Dramedies have gone unnoticed by the Emmys and while I don’t use the term dramedy to describe any of USA’s programming, the amount of comedy in the shows may forfeit them a shot at an Emmy. The only exception to this is ABC’s Boston Legal. Boston Legal has a lot of comedy in it but has two best drama nominations.

It’s been a long time since I cared about the Emmys and I don’t think USA really cares all that much either. Instead of making drama that is manufactured for the Emmy’s, USA has created a line-up of unique shows that have been ratings hits without making big waves at the Emmys. This isn’t an attack on shows that get nominated but it shows that you don’t need a rack of Emmys to be a good show. USA Network may never be a big Emmy contender but I encourage you all to check out the shows on USA, most of them are pretty good.

Scrubs and Smallville, Hanging around too long?:

January 21, 2009
There are four shows currently on television that are in their eighth seasons, American Idol Scrubs, Smallville, and Law & Order Criminal Intent. Two of which are likely returnees (American Idol, and L&O: CI) and the other two have recently made headlines about their futures. While there are a couple shows older than them on TV and a bunch more that are in their seventh seasons, There aren’t as many old shows as there used to be. Sitcoms have been known to last as long as eleven seasons and while dramas are much more across the board; few reach the milestones that ER and Law & Order have. Critics have jumped on Scrubs recently and Smallville lost a good chunk of its cast last year. ER and Law & Order have none of their original cast members left but cast changes were part of their history. Scrubs retains its entire original cast and most long running guest stars and Smallville lost most of its remaining original cast members last year. Zach Braff, Scrubs’ star and narrator has stated that he will not be back next year but ABC is still in talks to keep Scrubs around. Smallville, still a ratings hit (The CW’s definition of “hit”), is likely to return. While you can debate all you want if they are still good shows, it’s almost universally accepted that both shows are past their primes.

It’s hard to truly tell when a show should go off, especially these days. ABC has very few comedies and The CW has very few, if any, hit shows. While Scrubs may have just transferred to ABC, it’s still an important piece to their line-up. Smallville, which has been paired with Supernatural on Thursdays, is also very important to The CW. I can’t imagine Scrubs without Zach Braff, and the idea that ABC can bother me. If Friends ever lost one of the six, the show would be awful as its spinoff Joey proved. As for Smallville, there is no show without Tom Welling so I’m less concerned about them losing anyone else seeing as Welling as Allison Mack are all that’s left anyway. There haven’t been many new shows that have been hits lately but keeping the old ones around past their prime is a crime to TV.

NYPD Blue is a good example of a show that went out with some dignity on its own terms. After 12 seasons and solid ratings, the creators ended the show. 12 seasons was enough and only two members of the original cast were still around. Smallville is in a similar boat except that its show runners have left the show. This puts the decision to end the show in the hands of The CW more or less, which can be damaging to its quality and certainly the people’s lasting impression of it.

Scrubs id very similar to its former Must See TV partner Will & Grace. Both made it to eight seasons and both have their original casts. Will & Grace however took its final bow before anybody left and Scrubs may try to go on with only part of the gang.

Sorry if this comes across as an attack on long running shows especially since my last article was an outright attack on Cablevision. My view on long running TV is if it’s still close to its golden days then keep it around but when the prime is clearly gone, it’s time to call it a day. Scrubs used to be one of my favorite shows but I don’t really laugh anymore when it’s on. People can say don’t watch it all they want but I don’t want to remember Scrubs like this when its hopefully gone in 10 years. As for Smallville, I’m ok with it sticking around because I don’t think Supernatural is going to outlive it by much and I’m impressed with how its done of Thursdays for so long. ABC and Bill Lawrence need to think long and hard about what a potential ninth season would be like and I hope Bill Lawrence learns from his old show Spin City. You don’t take away the lead and expect anything but the worst.

Voom HD:

January 07, 2009
If you haven’t heard of the Voom HD channels, you’re probably not alone. Voom HD is a service of 15 HD channels formerly offered to DirecTV and currently offered to Cablevision users. Most of these channels are genre specific movie channels such as Kung Fu Channel or alternative sports channels such as World Sport. I’m a big fan of Canadian football so my first contact with Voom was through its broadcasts of the Friday night CFL games. Voom hasn’t been mentioned on the site because it produces no scripted, and very little unscripted original programming.

If you haven’t checked Voom out yet, you better hurry up. Last month Cablevision announced Voom would be dropped sometime later this month. I personally am not happy with this because I’ve seen some of the stuff they’re planning to replace Voom with and I’m not impressed. These include Comedy HD (no not comedy central), Pets HD, and a few others, which appear to be generic replicas of popular cable networks. Say what you will about Voom, there’s nothing else like its channels on TV.

I write about this not so much because I can’t live without 15 subpar HD channels obviously there are other channels to keep me entertained when all my shows are in rerun mode. It’s more because its not fun to have channels that you watch taken away. I’m sure some of you don’t care but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing for this site these past couple years if that we here at tvhell tend to get annoyed when we have stuff taken away from us. Whether or not it’s channels or TV shows it sucks when what we liked to watch isn’t available anymore. This is just another move by Cablevision that angers me.

Cablevision has a big revamp announced for February. They’ve been pretty hush hush about it but hopefully it includes BBC America. Or maybe some HD programming that is actually looks like HD. Whatever it is, Cablevision needs to give its subscribers a reason to keep paying and removing a service like Voom is not a step in the right direction.

The 2008 Fall Season:

December 27, 2008
Well we’ve reached the halfway point with no strike (knock on wood there still could be an actor’s strike). This first half is hardly the bounce back season we all wanted it to be but it certainly wasn’t a complete failure. Despite dips in ratings for pretty much everything on TV, there were a couple bright spots. Let’s take a look at the good and the bad from the fall 08 season.

The Good:

Well to start off, I think everyone was just glad to have all their shows back. The fall season saw new shows such as Fringe and The Mentalist really take off and revive the careers of Joshua Jackson and Simon Baker. NCIS skyrocketed in the ratings defying all normal trends that television has shown us in the past 20 years. 90210 helped bring The CW a few feet away from the edge of the cliff and True Blood made us all remember that HBO didn’t die with The Sopranos. Mad Men and Dexter returned to improved ratings and The Shield took its final bow in a way that no one could’ve predicted. Sons of Anarchy showed that while The Shield may be done, there is still plenty to look forward to on FX. While it may have a long way to go My Network TV saw huge increases in ratings, thanks in part to its acquisition of Friday Night Smackdown!

The Bad:

The networks didn’t fare as well as HBO, Showtime, FX, AMC, and the rest of the cable networks did. CBS took back its throne but not without some loss in ratings. ABC lost three of its sophomore shows, Dirty Sexy Money, Pushing Daisies, and Eli Stone (though there’s a small chance DSM could come back). ABC also saw Private Practice take a dip in ratings, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone with praise for Grey’s Anatomy this season. Despite a minor hit in 90210, The CW’s Sunday Night lease to Media Rights Capital was a bomb and so was pretty much everything it tried to put on the air.

The Ugly:

Thought I forgot a certain network? Well, while ABC and The CW aren’t looking too good right now, NBC was so bad that it wouldn’t have been fair to include it in with the others. All of its new shows, Knight Rider, My Own Worst Enemy, Crusoe, and Kath & Kim were failures. Life and Chuck are critically popular, but don’t do much in the ratings department. Law & Order: SVU and ER have seen ratings declines. But who could forget Heroes, NBC’s saving grace. Heroes went from being one of the best new shows two years ago, to being one of the most pathetic shows currently airing on TV. To top it all off, Jay Leno and his enormous chin will move up an hour and a half so that when 10 o’clock rolls around every night, you can see Jay instead of anything else you might have wanted to see. NBC may call this a strategic way to keep Leno from going to ABC or Fox, but I call it throwing in the towel.

Well that wraps up the 2008 fall season. Overall with the ever-growing presence of the Internet and DVR’s as well as recovering form the writer’s strike, we did all right. Hopefully with Lost, 24, and American idol coming back in January, we can see some growth in ratings. Until then, I invite you all to share your favorite or least favorite moments from the fall season on our message board or you can e-mail me at ian@tvhell.net. Remember all e-mails sent to me go to my mailbag, which can be accessed, from the news page. Happy Holidays everyone.

Crime Dramas:

December 10, 2008
For the past few years I’ve been saying that crime dramas will fall due to the fact that there are so many of them on TV. Well last year, crime dramas took a dip, but ever since the Strike ended, crime shows are some of the few to not take big drops in ratings this year. NCIS recently pulled in 18.8 million which made my jaw drop and now CBS is thinking of a NCIS spinoff to it’s line-up that’s composed almost entirely of procedurals. So why are the ratings so good?

I’ve thought about this theory for a while and I can’t give it my full approval, so I’ll let you guys make up your minds for yourselves on this one. Crime shows tend to be more successful in the ratings due to the fact that they are fairly easy to watch if you’ve missed an episode or you are a new viewer. This makes it easier for shows like NCIS to get viewers after being on for a couple years as opposed to Lost which is one of the most unwelcoming shows to new viewers that has ever been on television. Another theory is that people didn’t want to start watching a length soap opera style drama after spending as long as nine months away from it. This idea seems less plausible due to the continuing success of cable shows, which often take nine-month breaks between seasons and still grab viewers. The chances of people finding other shows to watch after having their nightly line-up disrupted for close to a year is big enough to at last partially explain why Grey’s Anatomy is doing poorly this year.

I don’t want to throw my opinion into this too much but another reason why serialized dramas are doing poorly is because they are old and stale. This applies more to Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives more than any other show but think about it. How many positive reviews have you read about either this year? It’s not unheard of for shows to lose ratings as the quality disappears. This idea doesn’t apply to all of them though. The trio of recently cancelled dramas, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, and Pushing Daisies were all in their second seasons when they received the axe. A possible explanation could be that there wasn’t enough time to get hooked on them, and then when they came back people had lost interest. It may be hard to think of it from that angle because if you’re reading this then you obviously interested in television or else you wouldn’t be looking at a website that focuses on it.

Crime dramas rarely stray from their mold and in that sense it’s definitely something people can take comfort in. While The Shield and The Wire both ended this year, I take comfort in the fact that even after 15 years I can still tune in on Tuesday’s and see John Munch put the bad guys away, regardless of what show he’s starring on (I’m a big Homicide: Life on the Street fan in you were wondering). Not everybody likes having an hour go by with nothing happening or watching a full show just to see a cliffhanger tell them that they have to wait another week for some resolution. Genre popularity will have its ups and downs through the years but it’s safe to say crime dramas will always have a presence on TV.

ABC: The Biggest Letdown of the Year?:

December 03, 2008
Last year’s Writer’s Strike hurt every network, ratings are universally down. Yet like the Montreal Expos were poised to win the World Series in 1994 before the Baseball strike, ABC had a lot of potential as well. Instead three of its new shows have been cancelled and CBS has taken back first place with its line-up of crime dramas. All signs pointed to a decline in CBS’s aging line-up yet shows like NCIS have skyrocketed in the ratings. I even predicted ABC would have a good shot at first in my summer analysis yet the complete opposite has happened. So why is ABC doing so poorly.

ABC in stark contrast to CBS’s theory that an episode of a show should have a beginning and an end with resolution at the conclusion of the hour relies on character driven serials. This method has proven to most successful with Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives but three of the four most recent serials to join the line-up, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, and Pushing Daisies, were cancelled by ABC. One of the reasons for the failure is that Dirty Sexy Money and Pushing Daisies hadn’t aired new episodes for nine months when they returned this season. While that’s something cable networks can get away with doing, obviously it was not the case for network viewers. Eli Stone came back after the strike was over last year but I guess that didn’t help much either. Another factor is the Wednesday line-up, which was composed of Pushing Daisies, Private Practice, and Dirty Sexy Money. Airing three shows with no proven established audience is a risky move and in times where ratings are down it may not have been a good move at all. Rookie shows often need lead-ins and while I love Life on Mars, it was stupid to pair it up with Grey’s Anatomy when you had three other shows with closer demographics to Grey’s than a cop show set in the 70’s. Eli Stone had a better lead in than the Wednesday line-up but yet again did just as bad.

Shows get cancelled, that’s a sad fact we all know. Ratings are down and lead-ins are more important than ever. I wasn’t too fond of Pushing Daisies but Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone were staples in my line-up. It’s sad to see some good shows leave the air because of poor scheduling by the executives. NBC may be tanking worse that ABC is but the quality of the shows on ABC this year could’ve gotten it first place. After this mess a third place finish a reasonable prediction. Dancing With the Stars had a strong year and Lost, which won’t draw the numbers it did in 2004m will hold its own. Life on Mars is a great new show. Sadly ABC is poised to squander this year because it didn’t protect its unproven shows. You can’t just blame all that on the Writer’s Strike.

The Shield:

November 21, 2008
Next week FX’s The Shield will conclude its seven-season run. While much has changed in the world of cable television since 2002, it’s safe to say that The Shield played a big role in what cable has become today. While all good things must come to an end lets look at the impact that Vic Mackey and the Strike Team have left on TV.

In 2002, there weren’t a whole lot of cable shows. Even fewer of them aired on basic cable where words that Oz and The Sopranos got away with were not tolerated. The Shield took advantage of the FCC’s policy which allowed shows that aired on cable past 10:00 pm to get away with more violence and indecency then its primetime competitors. The Shield took the concept of the cop show, and added a whole new dimension to the characters, far from the law abiding detectives on Law & Order or CSI and showed the LAPD from a point of view the network TV had never been brave enough to attempt. Coupled with an unconventional method of filming, The Shield raised more than a few eyebrows when it hit TV in March of 2002.

In addition to its groundbreaking contributions to basic cable, The Shield has been very popular with the critics over the course of its run. The Shield has been nominated for a few Emmys including a win for lead actor Michael Chiklis. The Shield also managed to get Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker to star in the fourth and fifth seasons respectfully. Few shows can say that it has had Oscar, Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony award winning actors star on its shows. Other stars include the Emmy nominated CCH Pounder, Walter Goggins, Jay Karnes, and Benito Martinez. While Mad Men may have earned the distinction of being the first basic cable show to win the Emmy for Best Drama, it’s hard to believe that AMC would even have an original show if The Shield had bombed, not now at least.

Few cable shows have been on the air for eight seasons so just for that The Shield should be applauded. But if you take a look at what FX has become since The Shield became its first foray into original dramas, you have to give it credit. FX led the surge of cable networks developing their own series and The Shield was at the frontline of it all. Whether or not you watch The Shield, I urge you all to tune in next Tuesday to watch one of TV’s true masterpieces take its final bow.

First Run Syndication, Can it Come Back?:

November 03, 2008
If you read the most recent Headlines you’ll see that I mention that a new series called The Legend of the Seeker debuted this weekend. This has been the first new show to air in syndication since I believe She Spies back in 2002. The main reason behind first run syndication’s decline was the rise of scripted cable series, which provide more stability, better advertising, more prominent actors, and in most cases more money to help shows survive. I was pretty shocked when I found out that Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert were making a new show to air in syndication and it brings the question of how will syndicated shows survive in a world where cable TV has gotten much bigger since the Golden Age of first run syndication.

First run syndication has existed almost as long as TV has, though generally in the form of game shows and talk shows. Shows like the Muppet Show and SCTV would bounce around between networks and syndication in the 70s and many comedies like Punky Brewster and It’s a Living would continue to air new episodes via syndication after their respective networks had canceled them. The real Golden Age of first run syndication happened in the late 80s with Star Trek: The Next Generation which gave first run syndication the credibility it needed to bring more shows into the mix. Baywatch entered syndication in 1991 after NBC sacked it. Baywatch would go on for ten years in syndication and remains one of the most popular shows of all time. In the early nineties, Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert created Hercules: The Legendary Journey’s which was successful though is best known as the show that Xena: Warrior Princess spun off from. Other prominent syndicated series include Highlander: The Series, Babylon 5, Earth Final Conflict, and Andromeda. First run syndication mainly aired sci-fi and fantasy series usually filmed outside the country.

First run syndication saw it’s downfall when the new millennium came about and cable networks like HBO, FX, Showtime, and the Sci-fi Channel, began airing their own scripted series. With The Legend of the Seeker becoming the first new scripted show to air in syndication in six years, the question comes about, can syndication come back? Despite my love of Hercules, Andromeda, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Babylon 5, and so many more I just don’t see first run syndication making a successful comeback. Cable provides a much better home for shows and the quality of them is much better than those of even the early 2000’s. On top of that, The Legend of the Seeker is a horrible show, with none of the great writing and acting that Hercules and Xena gave us. All good things must come to an end and while I will always think fondly of the cheesy sci-fi shows of the mid 90’s, I don’t wish them back.

Why TV Ratings Have Been So Low:

October 03, 2008
Well the wait is over and the 08-09 season has finally kicked off. The big question I was thinking about going into this September was how would the ratings look. Obviously the days where everyone watches a show in its scheduled timeslot are over but ratings seem to be down even for today’s standards. CBS is the only network to see its viewership increase and ABC and NBC have seen serious declines. As for The CW, 90210 and Gossip Girl have hardly been the saving grace the struggling network has been looking for. So why are ratings so bad?

Heroes is one of the shows I’ve been getting asked about a lot lately. The two-hour premiere snagged only 9.8 million viewers in its initial broadcast. This number doesn’t include the viewers who tivoed it and then watches in longer than 24 hours later. I for one did not watch it on its first broadcast and only watched it when I found the time to squeeze in two hours of television into my schedule. With the amount of commercials this day in age it’s not surprising to see that other people declined to sit through 40 minutes of commercials as well.

There’s been a trend in the shows that aren’t doing well this year. The dramedies and long serial dramas have been doing especially bad while CBS’s stronghold of episodic crime dramas have done pretty well so far. Fox’s House, Fringe, and Bones have also shown similar strong ratings. It’s been 11 months since viewers have seen some of these shows and part of the reason dramedies have been doing too well is that they aren’t living up to the giant expectations that come with being off the air for so long. I didn’t remember what had happened on Heroes all too well until I picked up season two on DVD a couple weeks ago. You can’t really expect tens of millions of people to do the same. Watching a show like CSI or Without a Trace is satisfying because you don’t really need to know the characters to follow the story and to feel some sense of resolution when its over.

Aging shows such as ER and The Shield have seen significant declines this year, somewhat surprising seeing as both are entering their final years on TV. Whether or not this is because people are tivoing them or watching online is vague to me but neither are big hits on iTunes. This TV season definitely will be one of great change.

The way we watch TV is changing, that’s nothing new. But I’m not convinced that millions of people are headed online to get their TV entertainment. The question of what has happened to the ratings is something I can’t give you a definite answer on but I can tell you that if ratings don’t pick up budgets are going to go down and some of our favorite veteran shows are going to enter TV Hell sooner than anyone would’ve hoped.

The Future of Sci-Fi:

September 02, 2008
Sci-fi TV is a lot like knuckleball pitchers in baseball. They hang on the verge of extinction but never really ever go away. Following the recent cancellation of Stargate Atlantis and the not so distant ending of Battlestar Galactica I’m a little worried about what the future hold for one of my favorite genres.

I first started to question the durability of Sci-fi when Enterprise bit the dust a couple years ago. Whether or not you agree with UPN’s decision it was a little sad to see no Trek on TV for the first time in 18 seasons. Stargate SG-1 filled that void for a couple years but even that folded after 10 seasons. Battlestar Galatcica certainly brought Sci-fi to the limelight again but I’m not completely sure Caprica will be a surefire hit. Enterprise was a prequel after all wasn’t it? While were on that topic who knows if the new Stargate will be a success. Only time will tell.

Sci-fi has seen resurgence on network TV once again. Heroes, Lost, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles have all been pretty big hits. Depending on the success of the new Star Trek movie we may see a revival in a weekly series for the greatest Sci-Fi franchise of all time as well. While Sci-Fi may not be extinct this certainly is a passing of the torch as most of the older shows bid adieu to weekly series. I’m sure this is enough to get any fan a little nervous in this ever-changing world of television. I can’t really say that I’m all that thrilled about the Sci-Fi’s recent decisions regarding their programming though.

The Longevity of Shows Today:

July 12, 2008
These past couple years we’ve been saying goodbye to a lot of long running shows without really seeing any other ones look like they’re going to last 10+ seasons. In fact the number of long running shows on TV has been steadily declining over the past few years with shows like NYPD Blue, Stargate SG-1, and 7th Heaven bowing out after hitting double digits. You have to wonder what current shows have five more years left in them.

The formula for a TV show to have a long life is pretty simple. A show has to be successful and it has to be successful for a long time. Keeping the budget from getting out of hand is another factor in the formula and shows like Stargate SG-1 and 7th Heaven survived because of that. Another strategy to keeping the fans interested is a rotating cast which Law & Order and ER, the two longest running dramas currently on TV, use. A fairly constant location is a factor in most long shows survival since building a new set is pretty expensive. These factors can be seen in pretty much every show that’s lasted more than eight seasons.

Now let’s take a look at some current TV shows that have been around for at least four seasons. Desperate Housewives is an example of a show that at its current place in time has all the makings for a long running show. However the old rules didn’t really take into consideration the dramedy and even the show’s creator has stated that he doubts the show will go on past seven seasons. The thing about dramedies is that the constant drama between the main characters gets old and after awhile you have to recycle some storylines, which is risky for ratings. There really haven’t been any dramedies that survived ten seasons. Grey’s Anatomy falls into the same boat but it’s medical premise and recent cast changes could keep it around a little longer.

Then there’s Two and a Half Men, one of the most popular sitcoms of the new millennium, which inevitably will suffer from a potential Cousin Oliver syndrome, seeing as Angus T. Jones can’t stay young forever. Sitcoms these days have had relatively short lifespan but if Scrubs can survive the inevitable loss of Zach Braff it could last a lot longer than anyone expected it to.

One show I think can last 10+ seasons is House. House has all the making for a long running show, only one actor the show can’t continue with, a constant set, and constantly changing storylines. This isn’t a guarantee that it will by any means but I think House has the best shot at making it to 10 then any other shows do.

The TV world changes pretty frequently and who really knows what shows are still going to be around in five years. All I know is that there aren’t going to be as many still around and there were in the past. TV is getting more expensive and with the increased budget comes the decreased lifespan.

2008-2009 Network Analysis Wrap Up:

June 23, 2008
Well if you haven’t read my previous five articles I recommend doing so before reading this one. With the Writer’s Strike ending and TV land returning back to normal the one question still remains. Which network will be number one next year?

Fox came out on top this year which isn’t too terribly surprising considering American Idol was the only program getting big ratings. The thing that people don’t necessarily realize is that CBS has been on a downward spiral for the past two years. It’s line-up composed almost entirely on procedural cop shows will inevitably fail them, something I’ve been predicting as long as I’ve been writing for this website. We’ll see some of the ratings bounce back as the shows put out full seasons but I doubt they will return to the way they were.

Fox is destined to win the ratings war this year but the future is looking good for ABC and NBC. Quite frankly I think both of them have put out their best line-ups in years. Fox needs some stability in it’s line-up that isn’t looking so hot with Prison Break getting well past its life expectancy and American Idol which can’t go on forever. Keeping high ratings is all about consistency as the network brings new shows in to replace the aging veteran shows. With that being said, if NBC can get the kind of ratings out of the Law & Orders that it did last year, NBC could be a force to be reckoned with.

CBS isn’t going to reclaim first place with the line-up is as now. NCIS, The Unit, and many other shows have seen declines. CBS needs some fresh blood that doesn’t have cop show written all over (Moonlight anyone?). I think the trend this year will be that the older shows start to see bigger drops. CSI, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, American Idol, and many more simply can’t stay on top forever and every few years comes the passing of the baton. I’m not saying any of them are going to get cancelled but I doubt ABC’s Sunday night line-up is going to be anywhere near how good it used to be.

The network analysis should give you a good idea about how the fall is going to turn out but once January comes, the game will change. Predicting TV ratings is a hard thing to do but if you follow the patterns you’ll start to see the many trends that exist. We’ll see what happens around this time next year.

2008-2009 Network Analysis – ABC:

June 21, 2008
For as long as I can remember, ABC has had a bunch of high rated programs but has struggled with its low rated shows which rank among the lowest rated in the Big 4. I saved ABC for last because I hadn’t really taken a look at its schedule yet but here it goes.

Monday Night:
8-00-9:30 PM – Dancing with the Stars
9:30-10:00 PM – Samantha Who?
10:00-11:00 PM – Boston Legal
In comparison to what the other networks have on Mondays, ABC has a shot at winning Mondays. Dancing with the Stars has continued to be a force to be reckoned with but Boston Legal’s meager thirteen episode order means that the not so hot spin-off of The Practice might call it a day early. Even with Boston Legal’s ok ratings, this is still a good line-up.

Tuesday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM – Opportunity Knocks
9:00-10:00 PM – Dancing with the Stars
10:00-11:00 PM – Eli Stone
I liked Eli Stone a lot, this line-up could be another winner for ABC. Opportunity Knocks, a British talent show remake doesn’t impress me too much but Dancing is a winner and Eli Stone is one of my favorite new shows from last year.

Wednesday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM – Pushing Daises
9:00-10:00 PM – Private Practice
10:00-11:00 PM – Dirty Sexy Money
Every network has a night that’s a complete what-if. ABC’s Wednesday night line-up has the distinction of being the only line-up on television composed of all sophomore shows. Pretty much the same things goes for all three, they are going to have to act as compatible lead-ins to each other. I don’t like seeing line-ups with no veteran shows on it but this line-up might do ok on Wednesdays.

Thursday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM – Ugly Betty
9:00-10:00 PM – Grey’s Anatomy
10:00-11:00 PM – Life on Mars
At the risk of angry e-mails, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is my least favorite night for ABC so far. Grey’s is starting to lose popularity and without the buzz it brings, Betty is doomed to fail as well. Life on Mars, another BBC remake is destined to draw viewers but Grey’s is not a good lead-in for a cop show. With that being said ABC is not really a good network for a cop show either.

Friday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM – Wife Swap
9:00-10:00 PM – Supernanny
10:00-11:00 PM – 20/20

2008-2009 Network Analysis – NBC:

June 14, 2008
NBC always seems to be waiting for its shows to get noticed by the viewers. Critics its line-up, yet it lost the first place race to Fox. Let’s see what they’ve brought to the table this year.

Monday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM – Chuck
9:00-10:00 PM – Heroes
10:00-11:00 PM – My Worst Enemy
My Worst Enemy is either going to be an instant hit or one of the first cancelled shows of the year. The new drama about two men who share the same body is sort of a homage to Jekyll and Hyde but we’ll see how it turns out. Heroes missed out on what could’ve been a great sophomore season and I’m waiting to see what Chuck can really do. Both were cut short due to the strike. This line-up has potential but that’s based on if it can cash in on all the what ifs I’ve just mentioned.

Tuesday Night:
8:00-10:00 PM – The Biggest Loser
10:00-11:00 PM – Law & Order: SVU
I’m very disappointed that NBC gave the Biggest Loser two hours of what could’ve been a great night. The Biggest Loser is getting old and certainly getting unreliable in the ratings. With that being said I think SVU had it’s best season in years and the ratings were up at the end of the year. Once Loser is gone mid year this line-up might show some promise.

Wednesday Night:
8:00-9:00 PM - Knight Rider
9:00-10:00 PM - Deal or No Deal
10:00-11:00 PM – Lipstick Jungle (Law & Order back mid season)
This night shows some promise, I’m definitely excited for Night Rider. I also think Lipstick Jungle could prove to be a formidable opponent to Dirty Sexy Money and CSI: NY. NBC hasn’t been that successful on Wednesday’s in recent years but If Knight Rider and Lipstick Jungle can pull through partnered with the reliable Deal or No Deal, this could be a good night for them.

Thursday Night:
8:00-8:30 PM – My Name is Earl
8:30-9:00 PM – 30 Rock (SNL coverage of the election will air in place of 30 Rock for a little while into the season)
9:00-9:30 PM – The Office
9:30-10:00 PM – Kath and Kim
10:00-11:00 PM – ER
This is one of the best line-ups on TV but can’t seem to perform in the ratings. Unless we see some sort of ratings spike this is going to be it for ER. I’m interested in seeing what damage this line-up can do with The Office spin off arriving in January but until then expect the ok ratings that this line-ups been getting so far.

Friday Night:
8:00–9:00 PM – Crusoe
9:00-10:00 PM – America’s Toughest Jobs
10:00-11:00 PM – Life
This night is a shame because Crusoe, a new action adventure series looks good. Don’t anticipate anything good from this wasteland of a night.

Sunday Night:
8:00-11:00 PM - Football
It’s football, what’s there to say?

Overall NBC will most likely not take first place this year. If it’s veterans shows can maintain ratings and it adds another hit to the line-up we could see good things for the once mighty network but until then there’s not much new going to happen.

2008-2009 Network Analysis – The CW:

June 3, 2008
The CW has made two big changes to its line-up this year. The CW has banished Smackdown to My Network TV and has sold off its Sunday block to Media Rights Capital to put whatever they want on it. The CW needs to step it up so let’s take a look at what they’ve brought for next year.

Monday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – Gossip Girl
9:00-10:00 PM – One Tree Hill
Neither one of these shows have really performed at all last year. Gossip Girl was terrible in the ratings but has become somewhat of a cult hit. Many call Gossip Girl the future of The CW but it needs a few more million viewers to really save anything. As for One Tree Hill I don’t see how it’s going to do any better than it does now.

Tuesday Night
8:00-9:00 PM - 90210
9:00-10:00 PM – Surviving the Filthy Rich
I’m excited for the 90210 spin off; I think it might be the only thing on this network I’m remotely excited for. If 90210 can keep the ratings that it would inevitably get from curious fans of the original, then I think something can be made out of it. As for Surviving the Filthy Rich, don’t look for it to be around long. The show about a former journalist turned live-in tutor looks DOA right form the start.

Wednesday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – America’s Next Top Model
9:00-10:00 PM – Stylista
Tyra Bank creates both of these shows. ANTM is vulnerable to run out of gas any season now and Stylista, a Devil Wears Prada like reality show, shows no sign of being a hit. I know I sound like a curmudgeon but my God is this line-up bad.

Thursday Night
8:00-9:00 PM - Smallville
9:00-10:00 PM – Supernatural
I’ve always liked this night for Smallville and Supernatural. Smallville has been in the press lately because of the mass exodus of the cast members. If Smallville can retain its viewers, than Supernatural should be fine as well.

Friday Night
8:00-8:30 PM – Everybody Hates Chris
8:30- 9:00 PM – The Game
9:00-10:00 PM – America’s Next Top Model Encore

This is pathetic. I thought sending away Smackdown might lead to better programming but nope. Everybody Hates Chris is a good show but come on why air an ANTM encore. This is an embarrassment of a network.

I was very critical of The CW for a reason; this is a very bad line-up. I don’t know what else to say.

2008-2009 Network Analysis – Fox:

May 23, 2008
Fox managed to finally overturn ratings juggernaut CBS to take over as the most watched network on TV. The credit almost completely goes to American Idol, which slaughtered pretty much everything else on the air. That being said, there’s not going to be a Writer’s Strike next year so Fox is going to have to come up with a plan other than hiding behind it’s biggest cannon which comes back in January in order to succeed. Here’s the schedule:

Note: As usual Fox will change its schedule for the returns of American Idol and 24 come January. Fox does not air a 10:00-11:00 PM show.

Monday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
9:00-10:00 PM – Prison Break
This line-up has the potential to do some damage. I would’ve reversed the order and aired Prison Break first because Terminator isn’t an established hit but I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference. Heroes is going to present a challenge for the two shows to overcome but this is one of the most impressive Monday line-ups for Fox in awhile. Should do pretty good if people haven’t gotten sick of Prison Break already.

Tuesday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – House
9:00-10:00 PM – Fringe
I like this line-up a lot as well. If Fox had a third primetime hour I would bump House up to nine but it should serve as a good lead in to Fringe. Fringe is a new show from Lost producer J.J. Abrams and is a X-files-like FBI crime/sci-fi show. I haven’t been this excited for a new Fox show since The Jury premiered over the summer of 2004. Whether or not Fringe will be a hit is up in the air but if Fox gives it a chance it could be successful.

Wednesday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – Bones
9:00-9:30 PM – Til Death
9:30-10:00 PM - Do Not Disturb
This night does not impress me at all. I don’t really think Bones is stable enough to air it without another drama on that night. Comedies don’t typically perform well on Wednesday nights either. This night seems to be a placeholder for when Idol returns in January. With that being said, Do Not Disturb, a comedy about a hotel looks like it might have potential to be good, if it doesn’t have a laugh track.

Thursday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – The Moment of Truth
9:00-10:00 – Kitchen Nightmares
This is not the Thursday line-up one would expect from a first place network. This is a line-up one would expect from The CW. I know The Moment of Truth pulled in decent numbers but seriously, how good is a reality show going to do against ABC, CBS, and NBC on Thursdays? I’m disappointed Fox didn’t try and gain dome ground on Thursdays.

Friday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
9:00-10:00 PM – Don’t Forget the Lyrics
Let me start off on a positive note with this one. I’m glad Fox didn’t stick a quality drama here for it to either away with no chance at another season. The negative to that is that this is the second night in a row of pure reality for Fox. Yes these are the only two nights reality appears, and I’m not saying reality is bad, but you aren’t going to win the night with a reality show doesn’t start with American and ends with Idol.

Sunday Night
7:00-8:00 PM – nothing Fox never gets to air anything anyway because of football so they finally stopped trying to.
8:00-8:30 PM – King of the Hill
9:00-9:30 PM – Family Guy
9:30-10:00 PM – American Dad
Fox keeps its Sundays fairly predictable, and if something’s not broken why fix it? King is the Hill keeps hanging on by a thread and if there was another animated comedy to replace it with I might say let it go but for now this should be a predictable season for how Fox will do on Sundays.

Well there you have it, Fox’s fall line-up. January will stir everything up so I get to do this again with Fox in a few months. Fox’s retention of first place is solely dependent on how American Idol does. Fox and fall do not mix well but if Fox can perform in 2009 things should turn out ok.

2008-2009 Network Analysis – CBS:

May 18, 2008
Well it’s that time again. Even though the season seems like it just started, the networks have announced which shows made the roster and which ones will enter TV Hell. This will be a five part news feature followed by an overall analysis of the good calls and the bad calls that the networks have made this year.

Monday Night
8:00-8:30 PM - The Big Bang Theory
8:30-9:00 PM - How I Met Your Mother
9:00-9:30 PM - Two and a Half Men
9:30-10:00 PM - Worst Week
10:00-11:00 PM – CSI: Miami

It’s kind of hard to argue with CBS’s Monday night line-up. Moving The New Adventures of Old Christine might be risky but comedy line-ups have shown to be very stable than switching around dramas.
Tuesday Night
8:00-9:00 PN – NCIS
9:00-10:00 PM – The Mentalist
10:00-11:00 PM- Without a Trace

I’m not so sure this move is a good one for CBS. While all three shows are compatible with each other, Without a Trace has struggled when it’s not with CSI on Thursdays. The Mentalist appears to be a straight rip-off of Psych except not a dramedy. My guess is that it will not be successful but it really isn’t up against much.

Wednesday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – The New Adventures of Old Christine
8:30-9:00 PM – Project Gary
9:00-10:00 PM – Criminal Minds
10:00-11:00 PM – CSI: NY
We’re going to see early on if The New Adventures of Old Christine can bring the Monday night comedy success over to Wednesday night. This move is very very risky and CBS is not successful with comedies on any other night than Monday. With the declining ratings of episodic crime dramas, Criminal Minds and CSI: NY could take a hit but are far less riskier and airing comedies on a Wednesday.

Thursday Night
8:00-9:00 PM - Survivor
9:00-10:00 PM – CSI
10:00-11:00 PM – Eleventh Hour
CBS lost the title of most watched network to Fox this year. Whether or not CBS can reclaim the title is dependent on this night. The bad news is that Survivor and CSI have been seeing declining ratings. I don’t see a better lead in for rookie Eleventh Hour that CSI in CBS’s line-up but I also don’t see anything new it brings to the table. The fact of the matter is that people aren’t watching as many crime dramas as they once were and this night is a big what if.

Friday Night
8:00-9:00 PM – Ghost Whisperer
9:00-10:00 PM - The Ex List
10:00-11:00 PM – NUMB3RS

Friday will most likely be CBS’s most predictable line-up in terms of performance. Ghost Whisperer and NUMB3RS will post the same usual ratings and The Ex List, will get ok ratings but will be cancelled by CBS in favor of giving another new show a chance. CBS made a bad decision axing Moonlight and I see no reason why they won’t cancel The Ex List as well even if it manages to do ok on TV’s worst night.

Sunday Night
7:00-8:00 PM – 60 Minutes
8:00-9:00 PM – Amazing Race
9:00-10:00 PM – Cold Case
10:00-11:00 PM – The Unit

I don’t know what to say about this line-up at all. Cold Case is the only show besides 60 Minutes, which is in a forgettable time-slot that deserves to be here. Amazing Race keeps going down and down and The Unit will not fair much better either. If Without a Trace couldn’t succeed here, why should The Unit be able to?

All in all next year will be a year of what-ifs for CBS. Nothing has been brought to the table that gives me any thought that CBS will reclaim its title as most watched network. I’d say this might turn out to be a building season for the once mighty network.

The Future Of Re-Runs:

May 11, 2008
Before the TV-DVD, Tivo, and the Internet gained prominence in the TV industry, the only way to see a show you missed when it first aired was by a re-run. If you missed a show it could weeks or even months before you actually could see the episode. It’s also been custom for a show to enter syndication after five seasons or a hundred episodes. Syndication allows many shows to continue even if they are declining in ratings because syndication deals allow the show to generate revenue long after production ends. With TV DVD’s gaining popularity, more revenue comes in for shows that didn’t get syndication deals but it also hurts the shows of the future that won’t get big syndication deals because the ratings are down for those syndicated shows. If it wasn’t for Tivo I guarantee you I wouldn’t be writing for this website but Tivo is starting to affect primetime re-run ratings so much that they are not even profitable. Big gaps between episodes are becoming normal because bringing in a new show is becoming more profitable the rearing and old episode of an established hit.

I started to notice this trend while reading Variety over the summer a couple years ago. If you looked at the ratings over than summer you could see that Desperate Housewives, a show that pulled in 25-30 million viewers a night was only pulling in 4-6 million over the summer. While low summer ratings is nothing new I also noticed that Law & Order: SVU, which at the time was bringing in 13-14 million a night had 8-9 million watching it over the summer. Law & Order became a billion dollar franchise because of the success in brings in with the multiple syndication deals it gets. The flipside is that Desperate Housewives sells more DVD’s than Law & Order but the cable networks aren’t going to pay the big bucks for shows like hat if they can’t get people to watch them again. Despite Tivo’s ever growing presence in the TV industry, syndicated re-runs still make up a big portion of what airs on TV. If that market begins to fail then veteran shows on the bubble might not get renewed if they won’t be profitable for years to come. Crossing Jordan is a good example of this. Crossing Jordan had been suffering declining ratings from season four onward but NBC kept it around until season six presumably to get a decent amount of shows for syndication which A&E purchased the rights to for a hefty sum. Syndication deals for shows like 24 and CSI: Miami have not had great successes even though A&E paid a lot of money for both.

As cable networks produce more and more of their own original programming, big syndication deals are going to be rarer and rarer. How this will affect the budgets and longevity of aging shows has yet to be truly seen but this is going to depend on how profitable alternate means or watching re-runs are. The Internet and iTunes are going to need to play a bigger part in brining in revenue for shows if we are going to see shows like 24 or Lost with massive budgets, see ten or more seasons. If that doesn’t happen then networks will start ending shows at seven or eight seasons instead of letting them go well past their prime.

The CW Not:

April 27, 2008
When I first wrote for TV Hell, I published an article bashing the CW for being a horrendous idea back in January of 2006. That article can be viewed by clicking the archive link at the bottom of the news page. The CW is a combination of the two “netlets” UPN and The WB, who folded in September 2006 with the new network consisting mainly of programming brought over from the networks. Now it hasn’t even been two years since the network has started but so far The CW has been nothing but a colossal failure. Everybody knows how Fox took a long time to take off but The CW is not a new network, The CW was supposed to be a super network. Instead it’s getting worse ratings than either UPN or the WB were getting.

The first big problem in combining UPN and The WB is the fact that the two had different target demographics. While high ratings in the adults 18-49 category is the target basically every network would hope to achieve, UPN, The CW and every channel other than the Big Four have much more specific targets they hope to obtain. In UPN’s case, that target was teenagers and African Americans. Early on the network tried to go for males by airing mainly science fiction but changed that demo when that strategy was not working. The WB mainly went for adults 18-34 but was having problems because the average age of their viewers was steadily increasing. UPN on the other hand was having success with its black comedies and finally achieving critical success with Veronica Mars and Everybody Hates Chris. The success of shows like Girlfriends along with strong performances from America’s Next Top Model helped turn the tide in the war between UPN and The WB over the final years before the networks combined. Nowadays The CW goes for adults 18-34, and has cancelled every black comedy except for Everybody Hates Chris along with Reba, The WB’s only successful comedy. When you cancel every show that once brought you good ratings, you no longer get the ratings that they used to bring unless you bring in a show that will bring you higher ratings. The CW has had a tough time establishing new shows, which leads me to my next point.

The next problem is that The CW’s line-up was built using shows that had been around too long. 7th Heaven, Smallville, Gilmore Girls, Girlfriends, America’s Next Top Model, and Smackdown were all shows that had been around for at least five seasons. It’s incredibly hard to get hype for shows that people have already heard about and have made up their minds about already. Veteran programming usually does not result in ratings increases meaning that the CW was basically settling for below par ratings. Supernatural, Everybody Hates Chris, All of Us and Veronica Mars were the only shows coming over that had been around for fewer than three seasons. The lukewarm responses to Runaway and Hidden Palms certainly didn’t help matters.

My third and final point is that The CW didn’t bring enough UPN shows over. UPN had been constantly beating the WB in ratings yet nine WB shows made it to the CW as opposed to the six UPN shows. It should also be noted that three of those were half hour comedies. Why someone would think to merge two networks and use majority programming from the lesser-watched network escapes me. UPN was still having problems in the drama category but every year UPN was gaining more popularity. Virtually all of The WB’s shows were on their decline. Since the merger four of the six UPN shows are now cancelled and only one WB show was cancelled with 7th Heaven and Gilmore Girls ending though some could argue 7th Heaven was cancelled. If the demo of the UPN shows wasn’t good enough why merge in the first place? While from the start I disagreed with the inclusion of Smackdown in the line-up, its ratings can’t be argued with.

Now all is not completely lost with The CW. Gossip Girls has been called a “hit” but I don’t know anyone who calls a show likely to average two million for the season a hit. The one promising show will the Beverly Hills 90210 remake seems like a smart move as The CW is going back to basics with a remake of the show that put Fox on the map. The CW isn’t likely to close up shop but hopefully this goes to show you what happens when two networks with two demos try to merge.

Reality Shows: The End of the Fad?:

April 21, 2008
If it hadn’t been for the Writer’s Strike I would’ve predicted that reality play an even smaller part in TV this season than it did last season. Aside from American Idol, virtually every single reality show has seen a dip in ratings and even networks like Fox have begun to wise up and fill their line-ups with scripted programming which offer a better chance at getting stable ratings in the long run. While my predictions as to when American Idol will end have been so terrible wrong since 2006, the big four networks have reduced the amount of reality on their line-ups for next year. As for this year, the Writer’s Strike wrecked the season and every network rushed to old tired series such as The Bachelor, Supernanny, and The Apprentice to fill the massive gaps in their schedules. The future for reality as a whole does not look to be as kind as it was to them this season.

While the origin of reality TV dates back to the early 40’s with pioneer shows like Candid Camera, it’s recent popularity dates back to the dawn of the new millennium with shows like Survivor, Fear Factor, and American Idol. The popularity of these shows helps bring in a new wave of TV shows with low budgets and high profits. However like every sudden wave of new shows from one genre, the overwhelming success of reality was short lived, aside from American Idol, which remains as strong as ever in its seventh season. The real exodus began a couple years ago when CBS shot to first place with an arsenal of crime dramas such as CSI, Without a Trace, and NCIS. Survivor was the only reality show really contributing to its success. ABC followed suit fairly recently with Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy popularizing the “dramedy”. As one door closes another one opens as NBC brought the game show genre back to life with Deal or No Deal in late 2005. With the end of the strike, game shows should appear sporadically in the summer and substituting for shows that are in re-run mode.

One of the interesting things about TV is that it constantly changes every year. Reality television may not be as big as it was a few years ago but there’s no way to tell if it could resurface in a few years. There’s still something to be said for the fact that MTV and VH1 succeed with almost entirely reality line-ups though the former has suffered a ratings dip as of last year. Reality TV provides cheap programming for networks and can be entertaining to watch. Like all genres have needed to in the past, Reality TV needs some time to recharge.

NBC Rolls Out New TV Schedule:

April 04, 2008
NBC has laid out its plan for the next TV season. Among the shows coming back are "Friday Night Lights," "Heroes," "ER," "Life," "American Gladiators" and "Lipstick Jungle." Not returning is medical comedy "Scrubs," after seven seasons with the network. NBC's new additions include an updated "Knight Rider" series and a spinoff of "The Office." There will also be "My Own Worst Enemy," starring Christian Slater as a suburban father who is also a high-level spy, as well as "Kath & Kim," an adaptation of a hit Australian show by the same name. The NBC version will feature Molly Shannon and Selma Blair. The network is planning on its schedule featuring new programing year round, with few reruns.

HBO: A Network Lost in its Own Glory:

April 03, 2008
If any of you read my article last week you would probably notice I was a little hard on HBO. The truth is that in 2004 HBO had eight shows on my regular line-up that I watched and since then that number has been reduced to three, all comedies. That number of shows HBO currently airs is six and the last time a new drama was renewed for another season was Big Love in 2006. These numbers don’t seem all that bad except for the fact that from 1997-2006 HBO premiered a new successful drama ever year. The other big premium cable network Showtime has been doing what HBO did for the past ten years and has been producing hit series by the masses. While all is not lost, A TV world where HBO isn’t a major contender in the Emmys is certainly a frightening one.

HBO had minor TV endeavors in the late 80s and early 90s but the real HBO we know today began with Oz, its first hour-long drama. Oz wasn’t a big ratings hit but it made headlines for it’s graphic violence and sex scenes which have become trademarks in HBO’s programming. It’s two biggest hits Sex and the City, and The Sopranos premièred in 1998 and 1999 and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Da Ali G Show, Carnivale, Deadwood, Entourage, Rome, and Extras followed from 2000-2005. All of them with the exceptions of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage have ended. You may wonder why this matters. It matters because these shows are the ones responsible for HBO’s success. Since 2005 HBO has cancelled The Comeback, Lucky Louie and John from Cincinnati in their first seasons, a first for the network to do. The remaining dramas In Treatment and Big Love are neither ratings nor critical successes. Flight of the Concords was a cult hit but this is not the line-up one would expect from the network that brought us The Sopranos once upon a time. Further more HBO ended The Wire this season. The Wire was never a ratings success but it will go down in history as a serious contender for the best drama ever title. It brought the stability and credibility to the line-up that none of the other shows have.

By reading last weeks article you could learn about Showtime’s recent success compared to the shortcomings of HBO these days. HBO needs to go back to basics to find their next hit drama. The mini-series John Adams is actually one of HBO’s finest series; unfortunately it’s only a mini-series. HBO should also only spend what it can afford to. Two of its finest series Rome and Deadwood were cancelled by budgetary reasons and while they were great dramas, I’m sure most people were angry with HBO for cancelling them after only a few seasons. HBO needs another Sopranos like show to be the flagship of the network.

This sort of down time in terms of good programming for a network has happened to just about every major network. HBO being the first really successful cable network to air original scripted programming was bound to have this happen sooner or later. For now I wouldn’t be too worried about the future of HBO’ programming but not having great drama from them has been kind of a drag.

Showtime: The Future of Premium Cable:

March 31, 2008
During my first run as writer for TV Hell I wrote about how Showtime was going to beat HBO is terms of quality in a few years if things didn’t shape up for the once mighty HBO. Well I wrote that article before "Dexter" or "The Tudors" had ever premiered so it’s safe to say that my prediction has more or less come true. HBO known for bringing cable television to life with riveting shows such as "The Sopranos", "Sex and the City", "Six Feet Under", and "Oz" in the late 90’s has been on somewhat of a downward spiral with each year saying goodbye to one of their great programs, and not seeing anything that could be perceived as “compelling” arrive in recent years. With the end of "The Wire" last month I find myself with only one show on HBO that I find any good anymore, "Entourage". With that being said every passing year brings a new show on Showtime that I can’t get enough off. While HBO may still have the ratings edge, Showtime is clearly on the rise.

Most of you probably don’t know that Showtime began airing scripted dramas around the same time HBO did probably because the genre that Showtime typically aired was a polar opposite of HBO’s programming. Any fan of the sci-fi show Stargate SG-1 would know that the program began in 1997 not on the Sci-Fi channel but on Showtime, which aired mainly science fiction programs until the early 2000s. Showtime then struck gold with the Canadian produced "Queer as Folk" and then struck gold again in 2004 with another gay orientated show, "The L Word". Showtime also found success with the black comedy "Soul Food". Showtime’s newfound glory began in 2005 with "Weeds" and the now cancelled "Sleeper Cell". "Brotherhood" and "Dexter" followed in 2006 and "The Tudors" and "Californication" joined the roster last year. While Showtime is still behind HBO in ratings and Emmy awards, it has built up an arsenal of programs that could do battle with HBO’s depleted line-up.

I said this is 2006 and I’ll say it again, Showtime has been on the rise and each year brings great new shows to its roster. Showtime currently has more shows on its roster than ever before, showing us that the future is bright for Showtime. HBO redefined what cable television meant, but sometimes the passing of the torch is inevitable.

The Aftermath of the Writer’s Strike:

March 27, 2008
As most of you have hopefully heard by now, the Writer’s Guild of America has ended its strike, which has more or less killed the 2007-2008-television season. However all is not lost, as the networks have gone in overdrive to salvage what is left of the season. Most shows will only be back for five or six episodes and most of the serialized shows like Heroes and 24 have been put on hold until next season. The strike also happened just as November sweeps were about to happen, so those shows that would typically have either been cancelled or received full season orders are getting the calls around this time. Most dramas and comedies are preparing to return next week or the week after. The list is shortened to a little less than thirty and mostly consists of the high rated programs such as Desperate Housewives and CSI. You may ask yourself what this means for the shows that aren’t coming back in two weeks or your favorite cable shows that would normally premier around this time. Reality shows should go on uninterrupted.

Since May is usually the time shows get a seal of approval or land themselves a spot in TV Hell, programs such as Moonlight or Reaper which got the nod to go back into production but were not guaranteed a spot on the Fall lineup have very little time to impress the CEO’s that will decide their fate. The writer’s strike hurt a lot of developing pilots so don’t be surprised to see fewer new shows next year than you would expect. The Writer’s Strike probably was most beneficial to ER and Law & Order that didn’t have much chance to air and might have ended this year. Aside from The Riches, I wouldn’t anticipate Cable shows to have shortened seasons but delays will most likely push Rescue Me and The Closer beyond their usual June premieres. Premium Cable shows such as Weeds and Entourage might be pushed back a month or two but that appears to be the only setback involved with premium cable as far as I know. Cable shows rarely air more than 13 episodes a season so filming is far less hectic than it would be on the Heroes or Lost set.

Overall the aftermath of the writer’s strike doesn’t seem like it will have any long-term setbacks aside from the fact that we all lost what could’ve been a great television season. What will be interesting is to see if the TV DVD’s for this season will be cheaper. Highly unlikely but hey a man can hope. If you have any specific questions about your favorite show feel free to contact me at ian@tvhell.net.

For those of you who don’t remember me my name is Ian Malone I wrote for TV Hell from 2005-early 2006. I took some time off because I got bored with writing about TV but after nearly two years I realized how much I missed writing and got Rich to let me come back on board. You’ll see my old section Headlines return within the week. I look forward to being able to give you the news once again.

Homeless "Scrubs" Cast, Crew Back To Work:

March 25, 2008
The cast and crew of "Scrubs" is heading back to work, although it's not known when and where the show will air. According to "The Hollywood Reporter," the final touches need to be put on an episode which was not completed due to the writers' strike. "Scrubs" may also shoot an additional couple episodes. NBC has not requested any new shows from the hospital comedy above the five that were finished prior to the strike and have yet to air. There is speculation that the new episodes may air on ABC, which has shown interest in picking up "Scrubs." Another possibility is that the additional episodes will end up as bonus footage on the "Scrubs" seventh season DVD collection.

NBC Beginning Summer Schedule In May:

March 06, 2008
NBC is planning on an early summer. The network has announced that it will unveil much of its planned warm weather programming in May, instead of the typical June. Among the shows rolling out a month early will be fresh seasons of "American Gladiators" and "Last Comic Standing," as well as the new horror anthology "Fear Itself." Reality competitions "America's Got Talent" and "Nashville Star" will premiere in June, as well as new shows "Celebrity Circus" and "The Baby Borrowers." There is speculation that NBC might delivering the new shows early as a way to clear its schedule for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. The games kick off August 8th and run for two weeks.

NBC Kills "Quarterlife" After Just One Episode:

February 28, 2008
It's one and done for Internet-to-television series "Quarterlife." NBC has pulled the drama from its lineup following the airing of a single episode. "Quarterlife's" premiere on the network Tuesday night drew just three-point-one-million-viewers, the worst in-season performance by a show in the 10 p.m. time slot for NBC in at least 17 years. The series, which was originally produced for MySpaceTV.com, had been scheduled to air on Sundays at 9 p.m. Eastern for the next few weeks. That hour will now be filled by "Deal or No Deal" and a "Law & Order" repeat. According to "The Hollywood Reporter," "Quarterlife" co-creator Marshall Herskovitz told a Harvard Business School conference Wednesday that it "never should have been a network show" because it is "too specific."

Montel Williams Hanging It Up After 17 Years:

February 01, 2008
Longtime talk show host Montel Williams is hanging it up. According to "People," the 51-year-old will stop production on his self-titled program following this season. The decision comes after 17 years on the air. Williams says in a statement that he, quote, "can't say thank you enough to those who've welcomed me into their homes for the past 17 years. It has been both an honor and a joy." During his run, Williams says he talked to "over 30-thousand guests" and had "over a half-million studio audience members." CBS Television Distribution does plan to air a best-of "Montel Williams" season beginning this fall. Williams, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, recently released the book "Living Well: 21 Days to Transform Your Life, Supercharge Your Health and Feel Spectacular."

WGA Reaches "Interim Agreement" For Grammy Awards:

January 29, 2008
The Grammys are a go. The striking Writers Guild of America has made a deal with the Recording Academy to allow its members to work on the 50th annual Grammy Awards show. Recording Academy President Neil Portnow says he's glad the two parties have been able to come to an agreement, noting, quote, "having our talented writers on the team further ensures the highest level of creativity and innovation" for the upcoming ceremony. While the Recording Academy had said it wasn't going to cancel the Grammys, the event could have been severely lacking in star power if artists chose to boycott the ceremony to show their solidarity with the striking writers. With the waiver, musicians can now participate in the Grammys while continuing to support the WGA walkout. The 50th annual Grammy Awards will be presented in a ceremony in Los Angeles, and air on CBS on February 10th.

Showtime's "Brotherhood" Renewed For 3rd Season:

January 23, 2008
Showtime is keeping its drama "Brotherhood" in the family. TVGuide.com reports that the cable channel has renewed the show for a third season, to include eight episodes. "Brotherhood's" cause was helped by its November 18th episode, which drew more than 650-thousand viewers, a series high. The drama follows the relationship between an Irish mobster and his state representative brother, and stars Jason Clarke, Jason Isaacs, Annabeth Gish and Ethan Embry. "Brotherhood" is loosely based on Boston's infamous real-life brothers, former state senator and university president, William Bulger, and one of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" fugitives, James "Whitey" Bulger. No word yet on when the show's third season will premiere.

"American Idol" Off To A Slow Start:

January 16, 2008
The seventh-season premiere of Fox’s “American Idol” may have been its lowest-rated in four years, but Fox executives say they are pleased with its performance.

“Idol” fell from last year’s series-high premiere perch, yet once again was a ratings titan that easily blew away the competition Tuesday night, as well as all other network premieres from earlier this season.

“Idol” received a 13.8 rating among adults 18 to 49, according to national Nielsen data. That’s down 13% from last year’s 15.8 and down 10% from 2006’s 15.3. Among total viewers, “Idol” was seen by an average of 33.2 million, down 11% from last year.

Both the demo and the total-viewer figures are the lowest Tuesday-night "Idol" premiere standings since 2004.

Fox has devoted just as many resources to promoting “Idol” this season as in recent years, said Joe Earley, senior VP of marketing and communications at Fox. In fact, “Idol” received more on-air promotion than usual, since “24” was postponed due to the writers strike.

"Dexter" comes to CBS:

January 8, 2008
CBS will rerun the entire first season of the crime drama "Dexter" from Showtime, its sister cable channel, starting next month. The Tiffany Network says that it needs to fill programming holes in it's schedule left by the contuinuing writers strike.

"Dexter," which stars Michael C. Hall (formerly of HBO's "Six Feet Under") as a Miami police forensics investigator who is also a serial killer, will make its CBS debut on February 17 and air for 12 consecutive Sunday broadcasts.

CBS isn't the only major broadcast network to air 'alternate' programming. NBC also said last month that it will recycle episodes of "Monk" and "Psych" from its sibling cable outlet, the USA Network, beginning in March.

The move of "Dexter" to CBS marks the first time that a full season of a pay-cable (Showtime) series has made the transition to commercial television. Pay-cable shows are often considered "niche" programming and not intended for mass-appeal.

The now nine-week-old screenwriters strike against major studios has brought production on all prime-time scripted series to a stand still that has left the broadcast networks with a shortage of original dramas and comedies to put on the air this year. Look for more unusual programming to make it to the broadcast networks if the strike continues through the spring season.

Starting this month, the networks have turned to a bigger-than-usual supply of reality shows and reruns to pick up much of the programming slack. NBC drew strong ratings with Sunday's two-hour debut of its rehashed reality contest show "American Gladiators, for example."

But broadcasters are trying hard to keep some fresh scripted offerings on the air. In addition to "Dexter," CBS is considering borrowing the series "Weeds," about a pot-dealing mom, from Showtime as well.

Late Night Talk Shows Return

January 2, 2008
Fresh programming is back on late-night TV. A bearded David Letterman made his return to the airwaves last night, launching his show by entering through a chorus line of dancers holding signs that read, quote, "Writers Guild of America on Strike." It was one of several references to the dispute which had forced the networks to air reruns of the nighttime talk shows for the past two months. But CBS' "The Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" are back on the air with union talent, as Letterman's production company secured a deal with the Writers Guild so its members could work on both shows. NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" also returned last night, but without the assistance of union writers. On his show, Leno referenced the strike with a mix of jokes and serious remarks. He also expressed his support for the striking writers, and noted that he was still following union guidelines in writing for his show.

ABC Pulls "Big Shots" From Schedule

December 13, 2007
Freshman dramedy "Big Shots" may have been given its last shot. Zap2It.com reports that ABC has pulled the series from its schedule, even though it has three remaining original episodes that have yet to be aired. "Big Shots" follows four powerful men and the trials and tribulations involving the women they love. It stars Michael Vartan, Christopher Titus, Joshua Malina and Dylan McDermott. "Big Shots" has been averaging about eight-point-four million viewers, which is less than half of the audience of its lead-in, "Grey's Anatomy." ABC plans to fill "Big Shots" Thursday night time slot with reruns of the "Grey's" spin-off "Private Practice," at least for the remainder of this month.

"Jerry Springer Show" Voted "Worst TV Show Ever"

December 07, 2007
"The Jerry Springer Show" is being called the "Worst TV Show Ever." That's according to a recent online poll conducted by the "Chicago Tribune." The talk show, hosted by former politician and "Dancing with the Stars" alum Jerry Springer, received nearly 20-percent of the vote to put it in the number one spot. It's followed on the "Worst TV Shows Ever" list by ABC comedy "Cavemen," "Mama's Family," "Cop Rock," and "Small Wonder." Rounding out the top ten are "Joanie Loves Chachi," "Barney & Friends," "Ernest Angley Hour," "Homeboys in Outer Space" and "My Mother the Car." The results of the poll are based on more than 49-hundred responses.

All Time Cable TV Viewership Record Set By ESPN:

December 06, 2007
The Monday Night Football ESPN telecast of the Ravens-Patriots game was the most watched TV show ever in cable history, making it an all-time cable TV record.

According to ratings information provided by ESPN the network telecast from Baltimore averaged 12,529,000 homes (based on a 13.0 rating), breaking the record for household audience set last year when the network averaged 11,807,000 households for the New York Giants at Dallas Cowboys on October 23 (based on a 12.8 rating). The game was seen by an average of 17,522,000 viewers (P2+), breaking the record set by Disney Channel’s High School Musical 2, which averaged 17,241,000 million viewers on August 17 this year.

The game was a huge winner in Baltimore as well logging some impressive numbers the game delivered a 12.9 rating on ESPN and a 24.6 rating on WJZ-TV 13 (CBS affiliate), for a combined 37.5 rating. Baltimore may have lost the (very close) game, but they made ratings history.

CBS' "Jericho," "Big Brother" To Return February 12th:

December 05, 2007
CBS' once-cancelled drama "Jericho" is set to return to the network. CBS has announced that the series will begin its seven episode second season on Tuesday, February 12th. "Jericho" was given a second chance after fans of the show mailed tens of thousand of pounds of nuts to CBS executives earlier this year, in an effort to move them to bring the show back. The nut campaign was in reference to star Skeet Ulrich's line in the first season finale. In response to a neighboring town's request to surrender, Ulrich's character Jake Green replied, "Nuts." "Jericho" follows the population of a small Kansas town trying to survive in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks on the U.S. The show's lead-in on Tuesdays will be the first-ever winter edition of the reality competition "Big Brother." It also premieres February 12th.

Conan O'Brien To Pay Non-Writing Employees Out Of His Pocket:

November 30, 2007
Conan O'Brien is in the giving spirit right now. "Variety" reports the host of NBC's "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" has decided to dip into his own bank account to pay his staff members who are currently out of work due to the writers strike. That number is reported to be nearly 80 people. The move comes as NBC's agreement to cover non-writing employees' salaries through the end of November reaches an end. O'Brien joins fellow late-nighter David Letterman, who agreed to pay his staff during the walkout. The Writers Guild of America has been on strike since November 5th. They're seeking a cut of programing distributed over the Internet and on DVD.

For Some Reason Night Rider Returns:

November 29, 2007
The show that I never would have guessed would return for a million reasons is back. My first job in TV was doing "Master Control". That's the guy that pops the tapes (back in those days) in and inserts the commercials. The poorly programmed TV station that I worked at aired "Night Rider" re-runs every day, so I had sit through each show at least 5 times, maybe more. Bad premise, bad acting, and just basically a dumb show that in it's time was competition to the "Duke's of Hazard" on CBS. Well, NBC is bringing "Night Rider" back, but this time is enlisting some fairly big names to take the place of the then unknown David Hasselhoff and crew.

Emmy and Oscar nominee Bruce Davison ("The Kill Point" / "X-Men" / "Close to Home") is on board to play the creator of "KITT", the talking super car. According to "The Hollywood Reporter, Davison will be joined by Wayne Kasserman ("The Kill Point") and Greg Ellis ("Beowulf" / "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End").

The launch / pilot will be a TV movie that is scheduled for later in the season and here's the premise; Mike Tracer (Bruening) is a race-car driver and the son of the original show's main character, Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff is in talks to reprise the role in a cameo). His childhood sweetheart (Deanna Russo) and her father (Davison) recruit Tracer to join the private, justice-seeking Knight Foundation where he will drive "KITT" and solve crimes. Wayne Kasserman plays a mechanic who also joins the team, while Ellis will be one of the bad guys trying to use KITT for their own ends. The new KITT will supposedly be a Ford Shelby Mustang.

Is Hollywood completely out of ideas? Maybe.

Strike Hitting Letterman, Leno's Salaries Hard, Ellen Cancels NYC Shows:

November 15, 2007
The Hollywood writers' strike is hitting late night personalities David Letterman and Jay Leno right in the pocket. According to the "New York Post," CBS and NBC have apparently stopped paying the stars, so every night the "Late Show" and "Tonight Show" hosts are off the job they are rumored to be losing about 100-thousand-dollars each. Letterman and Leno both decided to stay off the job due to their close relationships with their writers, who are responsible for the hosts' nightly monologues and segments. Meanwhile, "The Hollywood Reporter" says talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who has continued to work in spite of the strike, has cancelled plans to tape her California-based program in New York next week. Members of the Writers Guild of America, East had promised to protest her visit and try to disrupt any segments she shot outside the studio.

No Home For Rosie O'Donnell at MSNBC:

November 9, 2007
Looks like Rosie O'Donnell's television comeback will have to wait. "The New York Times" had reported that the former "The View" co-host was in talks to host a primetime MSNBC program. Now, according to her blog, quote, "there is no deal" and "her career as a pundit is over." An NBC executive had told the "Times" that one sticking point in the MSNBC negotiations was the potential length of O'Donnell's contract. The network reportedly wanted a two-year deal, while O'Donnell only wanted one. O'Donnell previously had her own Emmy-winning daytime chat fest. Last season, she served as moderator for ABC's "The View" before jumping ship several weeks before the expiration of her one-year contract following a heated on-air argument with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

"ER" May Be Back For 15th Season On NBC:

November 8, 2007
Longrunning NBC series "ER" may get an extension. Although it had been thought that this season, its 14th, would be its last, "ER" executive producer John Wells tells "Variety" that he is in talks with the network to bring the hospital drama back for a 15th year. "ER" will air its 300th episode in a few weeks. It is now the second-longest running drama on TV, following only NBC's "Law & Order." "ER" has been averaging about nine-point-nine-million viewers per episode this season. Like other scripted series, production on "ER" will likely be halted due to the current Hollywood writers strike. Wells has pledged to not work on his show until the writers reach a new agreement.

Rosie O'Donnell Looking To Get Back On TV:

November 6, 2007
Rosie O'Donnell is reportedly working on a deal to get back on television. According to the "New York Times," the former co-host of ABC's "The View" has been in talks with MSNBC. Sources close to the deal say Rosie could end up having her own show in the 9:00 p.m. Eastern slot, which would put her up against CNN's "Larry King Live" and Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes." O'Donnell has yet to sign a contract. The insiders say potential roadblocks include pay and the possibility of airing the show on the main NBC network as well. O'Donnell left "The View" last May following a heated argument with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She was replaced by Whoopi Goldberg this fall.

Strinking Writers Get Support From Jay Leno:

November 6, 2007
Jay Leno is showing his support for the of the Writers Guild of America who are on strike right now. The host of NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which will be in reruns during the walkout, showed up on the picket lines yesterday to deliver doughnuts to the writers. Leno's head writer, Jim Shaughnessy, says they just want fair residual payments. Shaughnessy says the studios are just being hard liners about not giving residual payments on Internet run shows. As an example, he points to the "Tonight Show" which also runs on NBC.com. While the studio claims running the show on the website is a promotional tactic, the writers believe it's revenue, and they want their share. Shaughnessy says writers don't make the kind of money most people think they do and his wife will be working a double shift at Macy's during the strike. Former "Saturday Night Live" writer Tina Fey, who currently writes and stars in NBC's "30 Rock," was also on the picket lines yesterday.

A&E Sends "Dog" to the Pound:

November 5, 2007
Bad "Dog" - A&E, the network that has aired "Dog the Bounty Hunter" since 2004, has indefinitely pulled the plug on the show. Last week, a recorded conversation was made public that featured show star Duane "Dog" Chapman. During the phone call, Chapman could be heard using racial slurs while speaking to a son about his African-American girlfriend. A spokesman for A&E said, quote, "we hope that Mr. Chapman continues the healing process that he has begun." The spokesman added that the network had not made a decision on whether to cancel the program, which is shown in over ten countries. Executives are scheduled to review the situation again in a few weeks.

WGA Says Strike Will Happen:

November 2, 2007
It appears that the Writers Guild of America will go through with their planned strike. The union's leadership informed members last night of the decision at a massive gathering of film and television writers at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The "Los Angeles Times" reports that the members will be notified by e-mail following a formal vote to strike by the union's board of directors this morning. Talks between producers and writers broke off Wednesday evening over disputes involving DVD residuals and pay for content delivered over the Internet. A WGA strike could affect many TV shows immediately, including "Saturday Night Live," "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "The Late Show with David Letterman."

NBC Puts "Heroes" Spinoff On Back Burner To Due Likely Writers' Strike:

November 2, 2007
Plans for a "Heroes" spinoff have been shelved in anticipation of a Hollywood writers' strike. Zap2It.com reports that NBC's six-episode "Heroes: Origins," originally set to air this spring, is now on the back burner. The show would have introduced six new ordinary characters with extraordinary ability, and let viewers decide who would officially join "Heroes" the following season. The project could be revived next year. The Writers Guild of America's latest contract expired at midnight Wednesday.

TNT

December 01, 2009
This article has been in the making for quite some time. TNT, once at the head of the pack for scripted drama on cable has been settling into a second place role to USA in the cable wars. This is something they’re obviously not too happy with and attempts to retake first place haven’t been going too well. What does the network have to do to reclaim its throne?

TNT had a lot of trouble finding a number two drama behind The Closer. In fact I’m not even really sure what they’re number two show is. They had a few shows that couldn’t follow The Closer’s magic including Wanted and Saved (which someone asked me about the other day). TNT has established a line-up that includes Raising the Bar, Hawthorne (I find the capitalized letters annoying), Dark Blue, Leverage, and Saving Grace (which will enter TV Hell soon). Its line-up is comparable in terms of quantity to USA’s but doesn’t fare as well in the ratings.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what part of the problem with TNT is. Its slogan of “We Know Drama” may attract some but can be offsetting to some who expect over the top dramatic series. In fact one of its newer shows Trust Me wasn’t particularly dramatic at all. Trust Me was given the axe but I thought it was one of the networks most original shows. USA’s slogan, “Characters Welcome”, works much better.

TNT’s new show, Men of a Certain Age, doesn’t look like it fits the We Know Drama bill though that’s not a bad thing. My only problem with it is it looks like Trust Me 2.0. It focuses on the relationship between a bunch of aging television stars and has comedic elements. Trust Me’s ratings weren’t horrible but it was shown the door anyway. I can’t see TNT giving Men of a Certain Age a fair shot when Trust Me wasn’t given a second season. TNT picked up Southland, which was stupidly cancelled by NBC. Hopefully Southland will be successful as it was one of NBC’s best new cop shows since Third Watch.

TNT became a serious contender in the cable wars a few years after USA and FX did. While it was blessed with instant success it takes time to build a lineup. The Closer is aging and TNT needs to establish a strong line-up to contend for years to come. Hopefully this involves ditching the We Know Drama slogan as it prevents them from reaching their full potential.

Thoughts About the Emmys

September 29, 2009
I don’t really try to hide the fact that I don’t like the Emmys very much. I think the Emmys has snubbed too many great cable shows (The Shield, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire to name a few). I thought I’d post my thoughts on this year’s results and what I liked about them. I’m not going to list them all because some of the wins weren’t very interesting so if you have any questions send them to ian@tvhell.net.

Hits:

Mad Men winning again: For me Mad Men’s second Emmy isn’t just a win for the show and AMC, it’s a win for cable. As I said earlier the Emmys have snubbed plenty of good cable shows so it’s nice to see the underdog get a victory.

Glenn Close: Glenn Close was robbed of an Emmy back in 2005 for the Shield. Even though she won last year for Damages she deserves it again. I don’t like how the exact same people from last year were nominated again though.

Michael Emerson: Michael Emerson saved Lost. There’s no question about that. Benjamin Linus is one of this decades greatest characters and it’s only fitting that he gets an Emmy for that.

Alec Baldwin: Alec Baldwin is hilarious on 30 Rock and he was clearly the best nominee this year for Best Actor.

Bryan Cranston: This is a marginal hit because I think Michael C. Hall deserves it too but it’s nice to see Breaking Bad bring home an Emmy.

Misses:

Lack of Variety: The Emmys added to the amount of nominees for each category but it was still pretty much the same nominees as last year. Nothing was really different and I’m not really surprised at all that both 30 Rock and Mad Men won again.

Toni Collette: I enjoy The United States of Tara but the Emmy belonged to Tina Fey. She worked her rear end off on 30 Rock and was hilarious as Sarah Palin on SNL. I know she already has an Emmy but she deserves another. So many other people had repeat wins and it’s a shame she didn’t join them.

The Amazing Race: Seriously? The Amazing Race has all seven Emmys that have come from the Outstanding Reality Competition category. This one should’ve gone to Top Chef.

I didn’t touch on everything so if you have question or comments you should send them to ian@tvhell.net.

AMC: The Little Engine that Could

August 23, 2009
AMC is one of the success stories that the major networks would die for these days. When I saw the 2009 Emmy nominations I was pretty shocked to see both of AMC’s original series listed under the Best Drama category. I wasn’t shocked because they don’t deserve it. I was shocked because the Emmys rarely reward cable channels other than HBO, part of the reason you don’t see much coverage of the Emmys on this site. AMC made history when Mad Men became the first basic cable show to win Best Drama and things have never been better for AMC.

If you asked me a couple years ago if I watched AMC I would tell you that the only thing that AMC was good for was a Clint Eastwood western on a lazy Sunday afternoon. That was true for the most part until 2006 when the movie channel purchased the rights to the British conman series Hustle. Hustle’s ratings were solid for an import (slightly better than A&E’s luck with MI-5) but the cabler was a long way away from USA, TNT, FX, or SyFy (still hate that name). AMC made headlines that year with the western mini-series Broken Trail, which was a ratings, hit but didn’t give AMC the original series it needed. 2007 was a better year however.

When I first heard about Mad Men I knew it was the perfect show for AMC. Mad Men’s 1960’s setting was perfect for a network that specialized in old movies and would definitely fit the demographic of the viewers they already had. The trouble was that AMC had no credibility as a producer of original series so Mad Men would have an uphill battle to find ratings. Fortunately critical support was there from the beginning and Mad Men captured last years Emmy for Best Drama. AMC had a hit.

AMC’s next series did not fit the mold that Mad Men established. Mad Men was controversial but you had to figure that out by watching the show. Breaking Bad however was controversial from the minute you saw the poster. Breaking Bad is Weeds meets The Wire and had me hooked from the first minute of the pilot. Breaking Bad has a lesser chance and taking the Emmy than Mad Men does but its every bit as deserving.

AMC is two for two with its original dramas and the future looks great. Its ratings aren’t as good as USA or TNT but it’s managed to do what they’ve done with their programming in a fraction of the time. I always like to watch out for what’s next with TV and I’m happy to see that AMC is here to stay.

Questions or comments as always can be sent to ian@tvhell.net remember my responses can be found on the Q&A page. I hope you all enjoyed your summer and let’s get ready for a great 2009 season.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis Wrap Up

July 02, 2009
Over the past month we’ve taking a look at the line-ups that the five networks have put out for this fall. We saw a lot of change in ratings in the first full season since the Writer’s Strike and quite frankly it wasn’t change for the better. NBC’s struggles were the most prominent but ABC and Fox also had their fair share of problems as well. The CW also took a dive after sending Smackdown! to My Network TV. The only network to not take big hits was CBS, which reclaimed its ratings crown even though a few of its veteran show lost a lot of viewers.

The one thing that really worries me about next year is the lack of promising rookie shows. Last year only four new shows really stood out and that’s not very good when you consider the small number of shows entering their sophomore year, which failed. The Mentalist, Fringe, Lie to Me, 90210, and Southland are the only new shows that really stood out last year and that’s a really small number. The networks are trying to play it safe at ratings are going to suffer. It’s kind of sad when the only new shows I’m really looking forward to are on The CW or on cable.

Barring any bizarre disaster this year is going to go to CBS. CBS may have sacked Without a Trace but it doesn’t have a single bad night of TV on its line-up. ABC is looking just as bad as NBC at this point. Grey’s and Desperate Housewives have seen declines and it’s failed to introduce any new hit dramas. Life on Mars really could’ve been something but instead they have to deal with Private Practice as its only drama that debuted in the past two years.

The network that has the most potential is The CW. The CW has been the butt of a million jokes in my headlines segment but I like its line-up for this fall. One Tree Hill should call it a day but it has a few promising new shows and some room for growth for its older shows.

I’ve said enough about NBC most of you probably already know how I feel. I won’t beat the dead horse (or peacock) any more than I already have.

Well there you go the 2009-2010 fall network TV analysis. Feel free to e-mail me at ian@tvhell.net with any questions or comments. Remember all responses are posted on my Q&A page. Since summer TV isn’t jammed packed with news I’m going to focus more time toward the What-If? Page. Readers are encouraged to e-mail their own what-ifs in as they make it a lot more fun for me to do.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: ABC:

June 30, 2009

Monday

8:00-10:00 pm – Dancing with the Stars
10:00-11:00 pm – Castle
Monday is a very winnable night for ABC. Dancing with the Stars faces very little competition from the other four networks and Castle should benefit from Leno on NBC. It’s nice to see Castle given a second shot and Monday can be the night that it finds an audience.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – Shark Tank
9:00-10:00 pm- Dancing with the Stars: Results Show
10:00-11:00 pm – The Forgotten
Not a big fan of this night. Shark Tank looks like a dumb reality show and The Forgotten looks like it will be forgotten come November. ABC hasn’t really done well with procedurals or sci-fi aside from Lost so this hybrid show doesn’t look promising.

Wednesday

8:00-8:30 pm – Hank
8:30-9:00 pm – The Middle
9:00-9:30 pm – Modern Family
9:30-10:00 pm – Cougar Town
10:00-11:00 pm – Eastwick
I’ve got to give ABC some credit for switching up their formula for Wednesdays but this line-up doesn’t look like a winning line-up. I can’t remember the last time five new shows were on one night and this line-up has a lot to prove. I don’t know why ABC would wait to put Scrubs on their line-up, as it would provide a veteran presence to this rookie line-up. We saw the line-up of Pushing Daises, Private Practice, and Dirty Sexy Money crumble last year and I fear the same thing will happen.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Flash Forward
9:00-10:00 pm – Grey’s Anatomy
10:00-11:00 pm – Private Practice
I’ve already said this year that I thought pairing 90210 and Melrose Place and NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles together was a bad move and I have to say the same for Grey’s and Private Practice. Bailing Private Practice out of the mess that was Wednesday night last year was a good short team move but I don’t think keeping it on Thursdays is a viable long-term solution. T.R. Knight is the latest departure for Grey’s and look to see some more ratings declines as age starts to affect the medical drama. Flash Forward reminds me of a show called Day Break, which aired a few years ago on ABC. Day Break bombed and I think Flash Forward will too.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Supernanny
9:00-10:00 pm – Ugly Betty
10:00-11:00 pm – 20/20
I think this will probably be Ugly Betty’s final year on TV but this is a solid Friday night line-up. Look to see some shows moved in here as Lost and some other midseason shows premier.

Sunday

7:00-8:00 pm – America’s Funniest Home Videos
8:00-9:00 pm – Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
9:00-10:00 pm – Desperate Housewives
10:00-11:00 pm – Brothers & Sisters
This is a good Sunday night line-up. Drea de Matteo is joining Desperate Housewives, which might help stop the ratings decline. I might have put Private Practice in the 10 o’clock slot since Desperate and Grey’s made a great team back in the day but it’s hard to make complaints about this night.

Overall ABC has put together a good line-up that isn’t going to win the ratings war. CBS has a better line-up and ABC has put too much faith in its rookie shows. With that being said it didn’t have much of a choice given the poor performances of last years shows. ABC can take second place if its Wednesday night line-up holds up until Lost gets back and if Thursday doesn’t lose any more ground.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: CBS:

June 19, 2009

Monday

8:00-8:30 pm – How I Met Your Mother
8:30-9:00 pm – Accidentally on Purpose
9:00-9:30 pm – Two and a Half Men
9:30-10:00 pm – Big Bang Theory
10:00-11:00 pm – CSI: Miami
Monday is a strong night for CBS and I don’t have any complaints. Accidentally on Purpose doesn’t look amazing but I don’t think How I Met Your Mother will lose any steam. Two and a Half Men and the Big Bang Theory both got multiseason renewals so it looks like this will be CBS’s Monday night comedy line-up for a while. CSI: Miami isn’t the show it once was but it doesn’t have much competition with Medium jumping ship to CBS.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – NCIS
9:00-10:00 pm NCIS: Los Angeles
10:00-11:00 pm – The Good Wife
NCIS’ continued success baffles me but it’s nice to see a spinoff on CBS that doesn’t have CSI in the title (thought if you rearrange some words it does). My only problem with this is that I don’t think the NCIS spinoff should be on the same night. I said this about The CW’s decision to pair 90210 and Melrose Place together as well. A couple years ago NBC paired L&O: Criminal Intent and SVU together on Tuesdays and while that is just one example I don’t think spinoffs should be partnered with their parent shows. The Good Wife looks like a promising legal drama but CBS has had bad luck with legal shows over the years so I don’t know how long this will last.

Wednesday

8:00-8:30 pm – The New Adventures of Old Christine
8:30-9:00 pm – Gary Unmarried
9:00-10:00 pm – Criminal Minds
10:00-11:00 pm – CSI: NY
I’m not jumping out of my seat over this night but I’ve criticized the other networks for their Wednesday selections so CBS has at least done something right. Old Christine has lost some steam and I don’t like Gary Unmarried but Criminal Minds and CSI: NY have both performed very well on Wednesdays.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Survivor: Samoa
9:00-10:00 pm- CSI
10:00-11:00 pm – The Mentalist
Moving the Mentalist to Thursdays was an interesting move and I think it was a good one. CSI has lost some ratings since it ruled Thursdays with Without a Trace but The Mentalist is as good a replacement as I can think of. The Mentalist was last year’s highest rated rookie drama and it should keep the ratings up behind the Laurence Fishburne lead CSI.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Ghost Whisperer
9:00-10:00 pm - Medium
10:00-11:00 pm – NUMB3RS
I love CBS Fridays. A few years ago I said Ghost Whisperer was going to bomb and I’m pleasantly surprised that I was wrong. Medium is a great fit for this night and NUMB3RS should continue to deliver. The only question that remains is what will happen to Canadian import Flashpoint when it returns. Flashpoint delivers great ratings for its price (something like $350,000 making it arguably the best deal in TV) so CBS would be stupid to get rid of it. We’ll worry about that problem when we get there.

Sunday

7:00-8:00 pm – 60 Minutes
8:00-9:00 pm – The Amazing Race
9:00-10:00 pm – Three Rivers
10:00-11:00 pm – Cold Case
Good but not great Sunday. The Amazing Race is past its prime and Three Rivers looks like a waste of the talent of Alex O’Loughlin. It’s nice to see Cold Case back but I’ll miss Without a Trace. CBS has all the pieces it needs to win the ratings battle this year. I’m not impressed with the crop of new shows save for NCIS: Los Angeles but I like that Medium has jumped ship. Fox and ABC are weak and NBC has basically given up the ratings war so CBS should easily take the crown.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: FOX:

June 09, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – House
9:00-10:00 pm – Lie to Me
Prison Break’s cancelation turns Monday into what appears to be Fox’s strongest night pre-idol. If Lie to Me can hold on to the audience it built last year than this should be a good night.

Tuesday

8:00-10:00 pm – So You Think You Can Dance (Performance Show)
I don’t see So You Think You Can Dance winning anything on this night. Moving Fringe to Thursdays was a mistake.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – So You Think You Can Dance (Results Show)
9:00-10:00 pm – Glee
Glee was bad, really bad. This coupled with the results show of a dance show that fewer and fewer people actually care about doesn’t bode well for Wednesdays.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – Bones
9:00-10:00 pm – Fringe
This is a good night but it’s not the night I would’ve put together. Assuming I kept every show on the line-up I would’ve moved Fringe and Dollhouse to Tuesday and moved SYTYCD to Wed/Thurs as opposed to Tues/Wed. Supernatural and Smallville did really well for awhile together on Thursdays so there’s no reason to think that Fringe and Dollhouse wouldn’t benefit from a partnership.

Friday

8:00-8:30 PM: Brothers
8:30-9:00 PM: 'Til Death
9:00-10:00 PM: Dollhouse
I’m happy that Fox renewed Dollhouse but I’m not happy about the timeslot. There’s really no reason to think that Dollhouse’s ratings will go up that much if you don’t give it a shot. As for the comedies, I’m not a big fan of Friday comedy but I’m not complaining either.

Sunday
7:00-8:00 PM: THE OT (NFL post-game)
8:00-8:30 PM: The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 PM: The Cleveland Show
9:00-9:30 PM: Family Guy
9:30-10:00 PM: American Dad

Sundays are Sundays for Fox. Animation domination as they call it. King of the Hill finally bit the dust and even though I would’ve switched the timeslots of American Dad and The Cleveland Show I’m ok with this night. Fox switches its whole line-up mid season to accommodate the return of American Idol so this line-up isn’t really set in stone. This isn’t a good enough line-up to give Fox the ratings war but it’s better than NBC’s and The CW’s.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: NBC:

June 02, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – Heroes
9:00-10:00 pm – Trauma
Trauma is a new show about paramedics in San Francisco. Doesn’t look like it will last long but hopefully NBC can salvage what’s left of Heroes, which has a really terrible finish to last year. Heroes doesn’t look like it will be a good lead in for Trauma so this night is so-so.

Tuesday

8:00-10:00 pm – The Biggest Loser
I don’t like this night at all. The Biggest Loser isn’t bad enough to banish completely but NBC should’ve put this one on Friday. Southland and Law & Order: SVU would’ve been my pick for Tuesday night but then again I’m not one of the executives who sent this network into the ground.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – Parenthood
9:00-10:00 pm – Law & Order: SVU
Parenthood looks like it could be a hit for NBC but then again Wednesdays at 8 don’t seem to work out for the Peacock. Law & Order: SVU takes the spot that I thought would go to the original but this isn’t the worst night on the line-up.

Thursday

8:00-8:30 pm – SNL Thursday (briefly) Community (after a few weeks)
8:30-9:00 pm – Park & Recreation
9:00-9:30 pm – The Office
9:30-10:00 pm – 30 Rock
Say what you will about My Name is Earl it was a good leadoff show to start the night. Community has big shoes to fill in the timeslot that shows like Friends and The Cosby Show once occupied. Other than that it looks to be a good night.

Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Law & Order
9:00-10:00 pm – Southland
Bad night. I’m not surprised that Law & Order is here but Southland deserved a better chance than being sent to the death slot. The Biggest Loser should’ve aired on this night.

Sunday
8:00-whenever pm – NFL Sunday Night Football

Not much to say about this one. Football will probably get better ratings than any two nights on this line-up combined Chuck will be back later this year. If you read my mock line-up I made a couple months ago you’ll see that while I got most of the shows that were coming back correct I mixed up the order. NBC isn’t going to capture first place this year but maybe it can probably live to die another day.

2009-2010 Fall Network TV Analysis: The CW:

May 22, 2009

Monday

8:00-9:00 pm – Gossip Girl

9:00-10:00 pm – One Tree Hill

Well this night is poised for disaster. Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton are not returning to One Tree Hill. After six seasons of so so ratings I think The CW should’ve given One Tree Hill the axe instead of bringing back something the fans don’t want to see. Gossip Girl doesn’t have much margin for error but I think it’ll do all right.

Tuesday

8:00-9:00 pm – 90210

9:00-10:00 pm – Melrose Place

This night has potential but pairing the two sibling shows together is not a move I would’ve done. 90210 and Melrose Place are bound to attract the same fan base and two hours in a row might be more than they can handle.

Wednesday

8:00-9:00 pm – America’s Next Top Model

9:00-10:00 pm – The Beautiful Life
I would’ve flip flopped this night with Thursday’s line-up because ANTM is losing fuel and The Beautiful Life will probably be the new show to go on The CW. Melrose Place and The Vampire Diaries will both be given more time to blossom that The Beautiful Life will so throwing it into Thursdays might’ve been smarter.

Thursday

8:00-9:00 pm – The Vampire Diaries

9:00-10:00 pm – Supernatural

I like this night a lot. The Smallville/Supernatural combo was one of the few positives things I had to say about The CW. With that being said both of them can survive on their own so splitting them up made sense. I’ll say this right now The Vampire Diaries is going to be this year Gossip Girl. Vampire series are very popular right now and The CW made a smart move picking this over the Gossip Girl spinoff.
Friday

8:00-9:00 pm – Smallville

9:00-10:00 pm - ANTM encore

With the cancellation of Everybody Hates Chris ANTM is the final show from UPN to still be around. This will likely be Smallville’s last year but it should do ok on Fridays. Since The CW gave up on Sundays I would’ve liked to see them air a 9:00 Friday show.

Overall this is The CW’s strongest line-up since its first year. All three of its new shows have potential to be hits and they made the right calls with their renewals (minus One Tree Hill). I don’t expect much from them this year but The CW might grow a bit in the ratings.

Why Jay Leno Will Ruin NBC:

April 30, 2009
This article is long overdue. I avoided the Leno bashing originally because I had hope that NBC would reverse the stupidity. Then I made my mock line-up (which appears to be accurate so far) and avoided it again because I was sick of dealing with the peacock network. But quite frankly I’ve been looking at the ratings these past couple of weeks and there is nothing there to suggest that this move will do anything but wreck NBC.

Jay Leno is my favorite late night host and I was sad to hear he was leaving back in 2004. I named my Headlines section after his although the content of the two are nothing alike. The Tonight Show is the highest rated late night show but those ratings don’t translate into winning numbers in the 10 o’clock slot. If anything NBC can hope for a not so distant third place on every night but Friday where it has an outside shot at second. Even if Leno’s new program doubles its current ratings, which is a very unrealistic scenario, he still doesn’t win the night.

Let’s look at NBC’s logic for making this decision. The move is a cost cutting move but it’s also a move that is likely to damage NBC’s profits. NBC’s two top rated dramas, Law & Order: SVU and Southland, both air in the 10 o’clock slot. Medium, Law & Order, and the second hour of The Celebrity Apprentice all perform above the networks average. The eight and nine o’clock slots are much more competitive and eliminating its best timeslots will most likely bring its average to a little bit above The CW’s. That’s a pretty big drop from the network that used to be number one less than two years ago.

Over the course of TV’s long history, NBC has been home to many of the greatest shows to ever air on TV. Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, Fraiser, ER, Law & Order, Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, Homicide: Life on the Street, L.A. Law, St. Elsewhere, and The West Wing all called NBC home. That’s a lot of Emmy winners and without NBC; TV simply wouldn’t be the same. This move is not going to work and I don’t think anyone wants to see NBC go under. We already saw UPN and The WB make a pretty unsuccessful merger and while this is less extreme big format changes rarely work. NBC is in big trouble if this move doesn’t work and there’s no doubt in my mind that it won’t.

The Decline of the Genre Specific Network:

April 25, 2009
Those of you who read Headlines have seen two genre specific cable networks drop their format in these past few weeks. Cartoon Network will begin to air live action programming and while the Sci-fi Channel will phonetically sound the same it will now be spelt SyFy. TV Land has been advertising TV Land Prime, a new slate of reality shows coupled with the fact that their definition of what is classic TV is questionable at best. They’re not the only nets to drop their format though. AMC (American Movie Classics) and G4 brought in programming that didn’t fit the type of programming they were known for. The most famous example of format dumping is MTV, which even went so far as to remove TRL from its line-up. So why is the genre specific network failing.

To be fair AMC still shows old movies, Cartoon Network still airs cartoon, TV Land still airs The Brady Bunch, and G4 still airs tech shows. The cable market has been growing and growing and most of the cable networks don’t want to limit themselves to a certain genre. I think it’s worth noting that Viacom owns TV Land, MTV, VH1, BET, and Spike which all genre specific channels or channels with specific targeted demos. While the major networks also have targeted demographics, (ABC goes after women more than NBC and NBC’s audience tends to be wealthier than Fox’s) they try to broaden their horizons. Look at how many dramas came to ABC that had striking resemblances to Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy following their success. People don’t want to see the same thing over and over again.

I don’t have a problem with networks like Spike since all channels have target demographics even though some are less obvious than other. I don’t have a problem with MTV ceasing to air music videos anymore. Building a line-up that focuses on one thing alienates a lot of potential viewers. Look at AMC’s success after abandoning the only old movies format. Mad Men won an Emmy and Breaking Bad is also critically acclaimed and I’ve received e-mails about it as well. Breaking the format pays off.

If you check in the TV Hell archives you can see what I thought the cable wars would be like three years ago. Competition fuels the battle and when the networks are forced to compete we get quality programming in return. We’re seeing fewer and fewer cable primetime movies and for those of us with all the premium channels that’s a good thing. Rescue Me, Burn Notice, Mad Men, and South Park are a few of my favorite shows and as the cable networks turn away from genre specific programming to allow any show on their line-up, we’ll begin to see more shows like Mad Men.
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Serialized Dramas:

April 18, 2009
The Prison Break finale is in a few weeks and while I didn’t feel it was worthy enough of its own tribute article I think the circumstances of its cancellation are worth noting. Serialized dramas are taking a pretty hard beating and while Prison Break may be the only long running casualty, many of the top serialized dramas are suffering big ratings drops. ABC has already axed four serialized dramas (Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Pushing Daisies, and the recently axed Life on Mars)

Prison Break is a pretty bad example of a failing serialized drama because the show should never have continued past two seasons. Prison Break’s first season was fast paced and exciting and season two also had a lot of great moments. However the show quickly lost steam and seasons three and four were pretty disappointing. It didn’t help that Prison Break suffered from a ailment that has hurt Lost, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, 24, and Grey’s Anatomy. It wasn’t appealing to new viewers.

Most successful long running shows experience declines in ratings as they got older but none of them experienced ratings drops as quickly as the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph (24 excluded as its been pretty consistent). The 90s didn’t have Tivo, Itunes, Hulu, or a painful writer’s strike but if you compare the top twenty most watched shows every week with their 90s counterparts you won’t see huge changes aside from the top five. Dramas like ER that bring in thirty million a week don’t exist anymore but the rest of the top 20 is more or less consistent with top 20s in years past. Shows like ER and CSI reigned supreme for years though and we’re not seeing that with the hits today. Heroes, Grey’s, and Desperate Housewives all had a couple years to go before seeing ratings drops as big as the ones we’re dealing with now.

Fast paced shows are fun but they can alienate viewers pretty quickly if too much happens. I can’t find a single person besides myself who can name half of the unsolved mysteries on Lost and that’s hurt its fan base. Big ensemble casts are fun but if too much is going on at the same time people are going to get lost and turn it off. Serialized dramas on cable such as Mad Men, Damages, and Rescue Me are doing great in the ratings because they don’t try and introduce more storylines than the viewer can handle. I don’t mean to offend anyone since most of the people who go on this site are more interested in TV than the average viewer but shows suffer if the average viewers tunes out.

The average lifespan of a drama that survives its first two years is between 7-11 seasons. At the rate Heroes is going I don’t think it’ll reach five. To quote a popular Bob Dylan song “These Times They Are a-Changin” and the TV world is no exception. Serialized dramas are in trouble and need to figure out a way to keep their viewers. There’s nothing wrong with procedural dramas but I don’t think people want primetime to become even more engulfed in them than it already is. I know I don’t .

Canadian Television:

March 23, 2009
I just read recently that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is moving forward with production of 18 to Life, a sitcom that was originally co-produced by ABC. While this might seem unimportant, it’s pretty relevant given how many Canadian shows have gone south of the border these past couple years. Flashpoint, which was produced by CTV was picked up by CBS over the summer and was at one point the most watched show in America. Given the reduced number of pilots being produced, Canada is bound to have a larger presence on American television in these next couple of years.

While finding a Canadian television series that airs is America is pretty rare, American TV shows are frequently filmed in Canada. Shows like Stargate SG-1, Supernatural, MacGyver, Battlestar Galactica, and the first couple season of The X-Files are all filmed in Vancouver. While this is purely speculative, I’ve heard from numerous sources that Vancouver more or less has the same resources that LA has for filming and includes discounts on filming and generally has a government that welcomes people to come in and film there. Obviously this has to be at least partially true or else there wouldn’t be a large presence of American shows filmed there.

I didn’t write this article to give you a list of shows that are filmed in Canada. I wrote it because ever since the Writer’s Strike, Canadian TV is making its presence known in America. It isn’t just Due South anymore, (Due South was a Canadian produced show ironically set in Chicago that was a modest hit for CBS in the 90s). Networks are reducing the number of pilots they order each year. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that the number of quality pilots will go up in fact it reduces the chances that that will happen. Instead of throwing million of dollars into pilots networks and cable nets are putting foreign produced shows on the air at a much reduced price.

Canada is just about the only country where this could work. It’s close by, the people don’t have accents (if you know what I’m talking aboot), and our cultures are pretty similar. The UK’s culture is much different from our own and obviously Mexico doesn’t work unless it’s for Telemundo. Flashpoint has been a pretty big hit for CBS and I think its safe to say that more shows will keep coming. Competition is key for success and if the number of pilots being produced is down, an outside source has to be called in to keep the competition going.

E.R.:

March 13, 2009
A tribute article to ER shouldn’t be too surprising to my longtime readers. We’ve said goodbye to The Shield and we’ll say goodbye to Battlestar Galactica soon but they’ve saved the best for last this year. After 15 seasons ER will be going off the air.

The Must See TV Thursday Night line-up had a simple formula. Four comedies and one drama and for its 24 years under that name things were pretty good. Some say it was because of The Cosby Show, Cheers, Seinfeld, or Friends that the line-up was such a juggernaut force. While this my be true, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and ER anchored the line-up and consistently put the competition to rest while closing out a great night of TV. Must See TV is no more but its legacy will live on, as will ER’s.

It’s hard to believe the same man who created Jurassic Park created ER but it was through Michael Crichton’s mind that both were hits. ER came to NBC in 1994 where it was expected to replace L.A. Law as the anchor of the Must See TV Line-up. This was no easy task but with Steven Spielberg’s support ER’s first season garnered 28 million viewers, second place overall. ER would finish first as the most watched show in America three times and finished in the top ten another eight times.

Even though ER had some geniuses calling the shots behind the camera, it was its cast that made the magic happen. George Clooney, Julianna Marguiles, Eriq La Salle, Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, and Sherry Stringfield made up the shows first seasons cast. It’s interesting to note that while Stringfield left in season three (she would return in season eight), Clooney’s five-season tenure was the shortest of the original cast members. I can’t name many successful dramas that can say that. While Wyle’s departure in season eleven meant that no originals were still with the show, Laura Innes, Goren Visnjic, Maura Tieney, and Alex Kinston would all star on the show for many years.

I can’t name a single other show who has had more famous guest stars (SNL excluded) than ER. Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Dan Cheadle, Alan Alda, James Woods, and Zac Effron are just a few of the many guest stars who entered the emergency room of the County General Hospital in Chicago.

ER is historic in many ways, but above all else it should be remembered for its final season. Assuming Springfield does appear in the finale, ER will have had every original cast member return for the final year, no easy feat for a show that has been on the air for fifteen years. Hopefully ER’s final season will be used as a rubric for all long running shows to follow, as I can’t think of a more perfect way to close out a show.

It’s sad to see ER go off the air but I think all the fans can agree that ER left the air with as much dignity as when it had when it arrived. The show’s 123 Emmy nomination including 22 wins (likely to change after this year) as well as its Peabody award speak for themselves. All good things must come to an end but let’s hope they all come to an end like ER has.

  

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