With September comes a new fall TV season. And with a new fall television comes a chance to be heartbroken when you fall for a series that is canceled after a few episode or that makes it through a terrific first season, only to fail to earn a renewal.
But if you’ve been angsting about DVRing your favorite show rather than watching it live, or paying for Hulu rather than for a cable subscription, you can feel a little less anxious this fall. At the Television Critics Association press tour in August, a number of television executives talked about how they’re trying to navigate all the new revenue streams for their television shows — and how they’re deciding what gets to stay on their airwaves.
“The way I look at these decisions, I and my team get one vote, you and the other experts get one vote, and the audience gets one vote,” FX president John Landgraf said at the Television Critics Association press tour, explaining why he was so disappointed to cancel “The Comedians,” a series starring Billy Crystal and Josh Gad that failed to gel with audiences and critics.
“Two votes gets a show picked up, but we can overrule a 2-to-1 vote against us for a time, if we believe either the audience or the experts will come around based on the quality of the show. I’d like to believe that about ‘The Comedians,’ particularly because some of the later episodes were, in my opinion, absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, you and the audience are just so overwhelmed right now by the sheer volume of TV shows that it’s very difficult to get you to take a second look at anything you’ve rejected. I wish that weren’t true because there are plenty of great TV shows that stumbled out of the gate but found their stride over time.”
It’s complicated
Executives from broadcast television networks revealed a more complicated set of calculations. When a reporter asked Fox co-president Gary Newman if social media buzz was keeping the genre mash-up “Sleepy Hollow” alive, he pointed to the strength of the series’ delayed viewing and also suggested that strong international support for the show gave Fox a financial cushion it could use to find “Sleepy Hollow” a better slot on the schedule.
And CBS president Nina Tassler pointed out that her network monetizes different shows in different ways.
“The network remains the all-important content engine that starts it all,” she told reporters. “But there are so many different ways to measure a program’s appeal and reach that go beyond the overnight to even the demos. Just a couple of examples: ‘The Good Wife’ averages 12 million viewers per episode. It is also CBS’ No. 1 show on iTunes and one of our top series on CBS All Access. We get paid for all of this. After its broadcast, ‘Scorpion’ adds nearly 6 million viewers per episode from DVR, and online streaming. This brings its total audience to more than 16 million viewers an episode. We get paid for all of this.”
When I asked Tassler whether there was a formula that CBS uses to evaluate shows across all these potential revenue streams and platforms, she said that CBS could afford to be more flexible, especially in cases where the network also owns the show it is airing, rather than buying it from another studio.
“We don’t have an equation per se, because every show is going to be monetized in a different way relative to the business model,” Tassler said. “We just know, at the end of the day, one of the things that’s really key about our schedule and key moving forward is our ownership position in many of the primetime shows, fall shows and our returning shows, which certainly puts us at an advantage. So there isn’t a set formula. There isn’t a set equation except the fact that the ownership puts us in a real prime position in terms of monetizing across the board.”
The calculations, of course, are very different for streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, which make their money not from streaming advertisements, but from subscriptions. And that means making shows that people are passionate about to the point that they’ll purchase a subscription to get access to that program.
“What we are getting at, you know, is never what is the most amount of people we can get to watch a single episode of television, but, rather, how do you make someone’s favorite show?” explained Joe Lewis, the head of comedy at Amazon. (Standard reminder: Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
“I don’t know that you measure that by measuring solely the amount of people that are there at the beginning. When I talk about implicit feedback, it’s how many people rewatch the show? How many people complete the show that they are watching? How many people talk about it in social media? … None of us are up here trying to make someone’s third-favorite show at a single night of the week. We are only trying to make someone’s favorite show.”
If your favorite show isn’t on one of these streaming outlets, you might still lose a show you love. But for all that the television business is changing fast, one great upside is that networks can profit from your enthusiasm, no matter how you express it.
