Chaos in Television

It was a month of Sundays as the networks claw and kick for audiences Feb. 11, 1979, was not a date that most people remembered much past Feb. 11, 1979. But to the hundred or so top people in the television industry, it was Black Sunday, the costliest night in TV history. In their desperation to knock out one another during the February sweeps--those weeks when Nielsen and Arbitron take an elaborate TV census--the networks spent a reported $13 million on that Sunday night to throw their heaviest punches at one another. CBS led off with Gone With the Wind; NBC followed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; ABC, hoping to profit from the Presley boom, countered with its own special, Elvis! For millions of TV viewers, who had spent most of the season slogging through Sitcom Sahara, suddenly the tube runneth over.

Sitting in his Fifth Avenue apartment, even William Paley, 77, the venerable head of CBS, felt the frustration. "I wanted to see Cuckoo's Nest," he confesses, "but I was also curious to see how Gone With the Wind looked today. A lot of people who wanted to see it again were robbed of Cuckoo's Nest, and vice versa. The public is getting an uneven break during these sweeps weeks. Everybody is sick and tired of them."

Perhaps the sickest and most tired was Fred Silverman, 41, the president of NBC, who threw two of his biggest movies into that black hole called the sweeps. "It's tragic," he says. "We had two blockbusters, Cuckoo's Nest and American Graffiti, on the air in this February period, and yet we reached only 32% of the audience. That is absolutely crazy. But the alternative would have been to put ordinary movies in there, and the only people who would have looked at them would have been the people in my family."

In the February sweeps, nearly every night was a blockbusting Sunday, a succession of multimillion-dollar explosions from the networks. Viewers were both delighted and frustrated, but what the TV schedule really showed was an industry in chaos, with each network going all out to knock off the other two. The pyrotechnics from CBS included Rocky, the Grammy Awards show and Marathon Man. NBC fired off James Michener's Centennial, Backstairs at the White House, a six-hour remake of From Here to Eternity, American Graffiti and The Sound of Music. ABC, which now rules the ratings charts, disdained such vulgar showmanship, but, in fact, it threw in the heaviest salvo of all: the $16 million sequel to Roots, which two years ago drew the biggest audience of all time.

The results were not always predictable; some of the blockbusters failed to go off. On the other hand, the figures were rarely very surprising. On that famous night of Feb. 11, all the networks did well. ABC's Elvis! was on top with 39% of the audience, CBS and Gone With the Wind had 36%, and NBC with Cuckoo's Nest had 32%. (If that adds up to more than 100%, and it does, it means that some of the families polled had more than one set on.)

Thirty percent of the audience--or a 30 share, in broadcast jargon--is usually considered respectable. A share is the percent of the people watching television who are tuned in to a show. It indicates how well the show is doing against the others in its time slot. If the people in 50 million households are watching TV on Thursday night at 8, and 25 million are tuned in to Mork & Mindy, the program would have a 50 share. A rating, on the other hand, is the percentage of all the 74 million households in the country that have TVs, whether the sets are turned on or not. Since it is assumed that each TV household consists of an average two viewers at any one time the set is on, each rating point is equivalent to a viewing audience of about 1,500,000 people. On that hypothetical Thursday, for example, Mork & Mindy's rating would be 33.

Roots: The Next Generations did not quite repeat the astonishing success of Roots I, but the seven episodes nonetheless knocked out everything that CBS and NBC ran against them. On Night 1, the show got a 41% share, beating American Graffiti (33%) and Marathon Man (28%). On Night 3, it pulled its biggest audience, 50% of all viewers, against two more movies. In the next three segments it slipped a couple of points, but still dominated the numbers.

The only surprise came at the end. In terms of quality, the final episode of Roots II was the best, with stunning performances by Al Freeman Jr. as Malcolm X and Marlon Brando as George Lincoln Rockwell. As ratings go, however, it was a disappointment. Night 7, ABC got only 40% of the audience, compared with 32% for CBS's Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes, a kind of all-star potato sack race, and 30% for yet another yodel of The Sound of Music on NBC. Still, helped by its old-time serials and the great new hit of the season, Mork & Mindy, ABC, with Roots II, achieved the second-highest-rated week in television history, surpassed only by the week Roots I was aired in January 1977; indeed, an estimated 110 million people watched all or part of the sequel.

As the sweeps ended last week, the networks counted their gains and losses, only to find that, as in a World War I battle, hardly any real estate had changed hands. All three were almost exactly where they had been on Feb. 1. ABC's position is so strong that the competition can huff and puff and threaten to blow its house down with expensive movies and miniseries, but for the foreseeable future it is likely to stay where it is--on top.

The week that Roots II aired, ABC had the top eleven shows in the country, with Mork & Mindy scoring higher even than the Haley saga. On an ordinary week during a nonsweeps month, it has six of the top ten shows: besides Mork & Mindy, there are Laverne & Shirley, Three's Company, Eight Is Enough, Charlie's Angels, Happy Days and Taxi. CBS usually struggles through with three in the top ten: All in the Family, M*A*S*H and 60 Minutes. NBC has only one, Little House on the Prairie.

ABC's rating since the season began in September is 21.1, CBS's is 18.7 and NBC's is 17.7. Translated into numbers, the figures indicate that ABC is watched by an average of 31 million people over the entire nighttime schedule, 3 million more than turn on CBS and 4 million more than look at NBC. Translated into dollars, a language TV folk feel even more comfortable speaking, each rating point in prime time is worth about $30 million in pretax profits over the course of the TV year. On the bottom line, it means, if the figures hold, that ABC will ring up about $72 million more than CBS this year, and $102 million more than NBC.

To outsiders, broadcasting has always looked a little crazy. But this year it really is crazy, and the February sweeps have blown down Network Row like Hurricane Agnes. Robert Wood, a former CBS president turned producer (The Cheap Show), refers to them as "the goddamn sweeps." He complains that "there shouldn't be such weeks in the TV calendar. They are artificial and destructive, and they contribute to the general feeling of paranoia." Like most other pernicious institutions, the sweeps still perform a function. Using two relatively small samples, Nielsen keeps regular tabs on how well the networks are doing. Some 1,200 families have the famous Nielsen meters attached to their sets to show which channel is being watched; 2,300 other families fill in diaries that tell not only what program is on but also who in the family is watching it. The results are available weekly, and many newspapers now ritually report the top ten shows.

This small survey does not tell how all of the country's 727 commercial stations are doing, however. For that information, which advertisers demand, the two rating services select hundreds of thousands of families, a combined total of more than 400,000 in February alone, and send them diaries. To cut costs, it was decided that instead of measuring daily, as Nielsen does for the networks, local ratings would be taken comprehensively during four months supposedly typical of their seasons: November, February, May, and three weeks in July. Based on how well they did in those periods, the stations would then decide how much to charge for each commercial minute.

Before long, of course, it occurred to stations that if they tried a little harder during those sweeps months, they would do better in the ratings and could make more money. But since the networks supply them with 22 hours of prime-time programming each week, it also occurred to them that the real effort had to come from their big brother in Manhattan. If a network is doing well, its affiliates also do well. If it is not, station owners become dyspeptic and surly and begin looking around for a bigger and better brother.

These days that bigger and better brother is ABC. Its great discovery was that kids control the dial, and that the channel turned on by a ten-year-old at 8 p.m. will often remain on through the 11 o'clock news. Hence, ABC hit upon a beginning lineup for the kids: Happy Days; Welcome Back, Kotter; Eight Is Enough and, this season, Mork & Mindy.

That strategy, coupled with pioneering mini-series like the two Roots and QB VII, has enabled the network to add 22 new stations since 1976, seducing nine from NBC and twelve from CBS. In some cities it picked up stations where it had had none before; in others it traded up, replacing a weaker station with a stronger one. Take away its affiliates and a network is nothing, and CBS and NBC are being slowly eaten away, an uncomfortable feeling, by all accounts. "In the past year, ABC has picked up one new affiliate a month," says Gene DeWitt, a vice president of BBDO, a leading ad agency. "Both CBS and NBC are terrified of losing their strongest stations." NBC's Minneapolis station, KSTP, is jumping to ABC this week, and several other NBC and CBS affiliates are thinking of doing the same. "The greatest pressure I feel now is to keep our affiliate lineup," acknowledges Fred Silverman. "One of my major objectives is to minimize any more affiliate changes."

There is no end to paradoxes in the TV business; yet perhaps the biggest is this: the sweeps are absolutely vital and absolutely meaningless. If each network puts its best foot forward only during the sweeps, then those months are no longer typical. Anyone who reads TV Guide knows that once the February specials are over, the regular series will return, and that March will bring a lot of mud.

If a network was weak in January, it will probably be just as weak in March, no matter how much it spent on stunts in between. The networks know that, the stations know that, and, most important, the advertisers do too. Last month, for instance, just as sweeps fever was taking hold, Joel Segal, a vice president of the Ted Bates ad agency, virtually ordered his media buyers to make cool evaluations in February. "The sweeps weeks lead to distorted audience data in this important month for local ratings," he warned them. "The message is clearly that in estimating individual station ratings, let the spot buyer beware."

If everybody hates the sweeps, why do they exist? The answer, like everything else in television, is punctuated by dollar signs. The sweeps are estimated to cost $25 million a year, and most of the local stations, which pay the brunt of this, think it is plenty. They are unwilling to spend more to spread the sweeps out to eight or even twelve months of the year, as the networks would like. If longer surveys are to be taken, the stations maintain, the advertisers should pick up the tab.

If it all sounds absurd, it is. Given the revenues of the industry, the cost of extending the sweeps to 52 weeks is so small as to be almost unnoticeable. By NBC's account, the additional expenses would be something like $15 million, about what each network spent for specials in February alone. A shorter extension, which CBS would settle for, would naturally cost even less. For the networks the gain--being able to schedule in a rational and orderly manner--would far outweigh the expense. Eventually the networks will probably pay part of the cost of local, as well as national, ratings. In fact, both CBS and NBC, which suffer most from the sweeps, have already started investigating the possibility of helping their affiliates pay for their ratings. If they do, ABC might also follow suit.

Sitting on top of its Nielsens, ABC, for its part, claims to have hardly heard of the sweeps. "Our point of view has always been to schedule the network from the start of the season until the end of the season," says Network President Fred Pierce, 45, "not necessarily for any particular period. Our average for the entire season will be the same as it is in any of the so-called sweeps periods that everybody writes about." Like General Motors, which sets prices for the automobile industry, ABC now sets the tone for commercial television; it lays out its schedule, and the other two networks have to work against it.

Though Silverman, the "super programmer," usually has all the publicity, particularly since becoming NBC's president last year, many observers in the industry think that Pierce is really the better programmer. Organized and low key in temperament, he has largely done away with the second guessing and last-minute, panicky decisions that plague his competitors. If there have been any internal tremors since Silverman's defection, they are not evident. Tony Thomopoulos, Silverman's replacement, seems a perfect subaltern to the superefficient Pierce. "The network is working as well as or better than when Silverman was here," says one ABC executive. "Silverman's penchant for working 22 hours a day and his personal drives caused some serious problems. Thomopoulos delegates authority well. There are no more head-to-head confrontations."

But considering ABC's strength, all Thomopoulos had to do was avoid knocking over the furniture when he moved into Silverman's office. On at least three nights of the week--Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday--the network seems so secure that the opposition might just as well give lessons in Kabuki dancing. On Tuesday, Happy Days leads into Laverne & Shirley, which is followed by Three's Company and Taxi. Wednesday is a night for everybody: Eight Is Enough, the quintessential family show, introduces Charlie's Angels and Vega$, both of which unveil as much skin as the network censors will allow. On Thursday, Mork & Mindy is already so strong that it gave Angie, the show that now follows it, a 41 share of the audience on its premiere.

The other four nights, however, are ABC's weak spots. On Friday, NBC's Different Strokes, which began last month, is doing well, nicely beating The Incredible Hulk on CBS and crushing ABC's Making It. Unfortunately for NBC, its stockpile of good shows is so low that it cannot capitalize on such a strong lead-in; there is nothing for an encore. ABC also starts behind on Saturday, with the mindless Delta House, but the night is saved by Love Boat and Fantasy Island, both strong, fatuously cheerful shows. Sunday is also a downer for ABC, with the grotesque Battlestar Galactica, which is a very bad parody of Star Wars. Monday's starter, Salvage-1, usually loses out to NBC's Little House on the Prairie.

According to Paley, CBS's problems began several years ago, when it ran out of inventory: attractive shows to replace the aging hits that it started the decade with. "We made a very, very serious blunder," he says. "Maybe we were too content, but when things started to go bad, we just didn't have the inventory we used to have. This was during the time Silverman was programmer [before he moved to ABC] too, so he has to take some of the blame along with other people. I frankly didn't know we were that far behind, but when the chips were down, we just were."

To put itself back in contention, CBS restructured its entire organization in October 1977, modeling itself on the winner, ABC, and in the process replaced almost its entire executive lineup. NBC also made big changes when Silverman arrived, and in Hollywood, where shows are produced, the standing joke is "If my boss calls, get his name." Robert Daly, president of CBS Entertainment, and Bud Grant, programming vice president, moved to Los Angeles to be nearer production. They were handed what seems to be a blank check to order pilots, giving them a much larger choice than their predecessors ever had. "They are grinding away very quietly there," says one Hollywood producer. "They are very low key, but they are working." So far, however, the results are not very impressive. One show, Coed Fever, was taken off the air after the first outing. Others, like Paper Chase, have been switched around so often that no one knows from week to week where they will be--a scheduling sin now committed by all the networks. "When they moved our show up to 10 o'clock on Tuesday our ratings picked up substantially," says John Houseman, 76, who plays the world's most formidable law professor in Paper Chase. "Now we are back to 8 p.m. against Happy Days, and we are going to be pre-empted twice in March. You can't build an audience that way. Bill Paley told me that he is very proud of our show and wishes more people would watch it." Sounding like the character he plays, Houseman adds: "But I'm the specimen that is trotted out to show how respectable CBS is. I am token quality, and I am not overflowing with gratitude."

At Fred Silverman's NBC there is so much movement that the RCA building, which has never before known so much activity, almost visibly shakes. But the network is further behind today than it was a year ago. Silverman more than doubled his California programming staff, adding 21 "talent" executives so quickly that the entire Hollywood press office had to move into trailers to make room for them. The trailers were immediately christened the Silverman Express. Then, in an unprecedented action last fall, Silverman dumped all seven of NBC's new shows, replacing them earlier this year with those more in his image. Most have been disasters, but none has failed quite so resoundingly as Supertrain, which cost almost $12 million just to pull out of the station.

Supertrain was supposed to be the "Little Engine that Could" for NBC, the series that would pull it out of its midseason lows. But the network tried to do a big, complex show in less than half the time it requires. Producer Dan Curtis, 51, played Casey Jones, but even he was nonplused when he was asked last August to execute Programmer Paul Klein's idea. "What the hell is it," he asked, "Love Boat on wheels?" Oh, no, he was told; it would be more on the order of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, mystery-comedy with a high sheen. The nightmare began at once. Set builders hammered away 24 hours a day, seven days a week, often without finished designs to follow. Before the standing sets were finished, the cinematographer and most of his crew had quit, along with all the carpenters and many of the construction workers. The miniatures, used for exterior shots of a speeding train, were wrecked twice, once in a flood, once when an overpowered engine jumped the track. Script and casting problems were just as bad. One script ripped off Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train; another leaned very hard on The Prisoner of Zenda. In addition, most of Curtis' first-choice performers were unavailable so fast. Something eventually came of all the effort, but it scarcely seemed worth the money. Reviews were awful; ratings were as bad. In its last outing, Supertrain received only 19% of the audience.

Like CBS, NBC is giving more money to the Hollywood TV factories, and, as it prepares next fall's schedule, it has 55 pilots to choose from. Instead of being overjoyed at all the work, however, producers are complaining that both CBS and NBC want too much too fast. "Everybody is being drained, and there is a waste of talent," says Ed Montanus, president of MGM television (How the West Was Won, CHiPs). "Some of the really good writers and producers are becoming disillusioned and moving out. We're working in a Barnum & Bailey atmosphere, and the guy with the strongest stomach is going to win."

What those stomachs are supposed to provide is belly laughs, and all three networks are emphasizing comedy, with 15 comedy pilots being considered by NBC alone. Building on Different Strokes, Silverman hopes to win Friday night with laughter, just as ABC's giggles have locked up Tuesday. "People want to laugh," he says. "They just want to look at television and forget their troubles. I'm not a psychologist, but I would imagine that that's the root of the current trend."

The question is how long Silverman has to make good. One of his old bosses, Bill Paley, thinks the test will come next fall; up to now he has not had time, so the argument goes, to show his stuff. Many others doubt that he can do much until the summer of 1980, when the network will automatically command the air waves with the Moscow Olympics. Silverman himself seems to lean toward that timetable. "If I had a crystal ball and predicted what television will look like by the end of 1980," he says, "my judgment would be that CBS and NBC would be on top. But what I learned from Supertrain is that there really are no short cuts, no substitute for careful thought and movement in very deliberate ways. This business of coming in with smoke and mirrors and doing a hat trick is nonsense."

Everybody in television has his own crystal ball, however, and most of them show the end of 1980 looking remarkably like the beginning of 1979. ABC will be on top, according to that vision, and CBS and NBC will still be battling for No. 2. The ratings race will be even more intense than it is now, and all three networks will be spending more and more --and enjoying it less and less--just to run in place. As they struggle to be No. 1, the networks are beginning to look increasingly alike. Within the space of a few weeks, earlier this year, for instance, all three introduced imitations of the hit movie Animal House. All were bad.

Since about 1950, when TV really got started in the U.S., Americans have had a love affair with the tube, and each year the number of viewers rose. In 1977 Nielsen gave the networks a scare, however, with statistics indicating that for the first time viewing was down by a fraction. They felt relieved when Nielsen showed that the pattern was up again in 1978, but last week the Washington Post, in a nationwide sample, confirmed the earlier findings: in a random poll of 1,693 people, the Post reported that 53% said they were watching less TV than they were five years ago. Only 32% said that they were watching more. Any show, no matter how good, has a fatigue factor, and after a time viewership automatically drops. Perhaps a fatigue factor has set in for the whole medium.

Of all the network bosses, Paley seems to be most aware of the problem. "I think there's something in the air that says we want something better," he declares. His solution is to treat the ratings race something like the arms race, with the networks fashioning their own SALT treaty: All three, he says, should give two hours a week to high-quality programs that would not be rated at all. Each one would take a different night, and the public would have a total of six hours of fine viewing. "It would give the mass audience an opportunity to sample things they haven't tasted before," he says. "There might be--I think there would be--an elevation in taste and interest." Both Silverman and Pierce, however, say that they are already offering such programs. The Pax Paley will probably be more elusive than an Arab-Israeli peace.

The networks must also worry about a whole range of new competitors. Cable and pay TV are siphoning off more viewers each year; videocassette recorders enable people to record and watch shows at their own leisure, at least partially negating all the network attempts to find a strong 8 o'clock lead-in; and relatively cheap videodiscs will soon allow people to buy their own shows to play again and again. Public television is becoming increasingly popular and even the local affiliates are less reliable. They are frequently bumping network shows and replacing them with syndicated specials like Edward the King. The networks, in short, may soon be fighting for a smaller prize. Whether that will increase or reduce the chaos in television programming remains, quite literally, to be seen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.