Posted 7:56 AM by Blah blah

When Quality TV Shows Die: TV Economics Must Change! (Television)

Sigh. The cutthroat and unstable TV business. My blog has lasted longer than most TV shows introduced last year, a chilling thought if you wish to work in entertainment.

Executive producer David E. Kelley not only cut six of the major cast of his ABC legal drama The Practice last month, he also cut several key actors from his show Boston Public (Fox). Why do I feel the same chill of a Silicon Valley startup when I read this? When ABC executive Susan Lyne helped ruin the show by moving it from Sunday to Monday nights in favor of their new show Dragnet, I thought: "Hello? Why not just negotiate salary cuts for the high-priced main actors instead? Why give Kelley and cast the runaround?" By the way, Dragnet ain't doing well in the ratings either.

To see how volatile and unpredictable it is to seek long-term employment with a TV show, see this shockingly long list of cancelled TV series from 2002-2003 which aren't returning for next year. They include some top quality shows! Matt Groening's cartoon Futurama (Fox), narcotics cartel drama Kingpin (NBC), prison drama Oz (HBO), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (WB), and Whose Line Is It Anyway? (ABC) are shows I'm especially sad to see go. Whose Line is one of the funniest shows I've EVER seen. I wanted to but never had a chance to check out Kingpin or Oz. The sexy James Cameron thriller Dark Angel was also canned last year.

Also, creator Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme are leaving The West Wing after this season, for reasons unclear.

The Russell Wong drama Black Sash is dead too. Based on reviews, it probably deserved to die. (I promoted it heavily when it came out at the end of March.)

What the hell is wrong when so much top-notch writing and acting gets shafted? What does that say to people who try their best to raise the bar of quality entertainment in America? It's not that the top actors and producers don't make money. But the art and their rewards are so rarely sustained.

I barely watch any TV myself, but I avidly follow the business. I wish they'd change the economics of the TV business. Most of the affluent, 18-49 viewers they target are too busy to drop everything to watch a show at a fixed time each week. Tivo lets people skip the commercials. People are pirating episodes and downloading them on the Net with BitTorrent.

C'mon folks! The way we deliver and schedule our TV shows needs to change. Cable TV needs to let people CHOOSE what program they want, whenever they want. The Internet should give us streaming video of our shows on demand, for a price.

More and more, media companies are releasing entire seasons of TV shows on DVD. That's how I watched my favorite show of all, Fox's 24. The Simpsons, Alias, Futurama, Dark Angel, and Sex and the City are shows I've almost never watched, but whose DVDs I'd gladly buy.

Maybe entertainment companies should plan some shows purely for the DVD market.

Maybe they should follow Britain's lead, where several shows are designed with a fixed run of episodes in mind, mainly written by one or two people. No need to think about renewing the show. No need to worry about it losing creative focus. Hilarious British shows like Mr. Bean, Fawlty Towers, and Coupling (soon to be remade in the U.S.) all had limited, fixed runs.

I don't know what must change, but someone needs to figure out a way to preserve quality TV that doesn't depend on the whims of showing it Sunday vs. Monday nights.

Cast dismissed: 6 fired at 'Practice' (Chicago Sun-Times):
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Dylan McDermott, Kelli Williams and Lara Flynn Boyle are among the six major cast members pink-slipped from David E. Kelley's "The Practice" in response to ABC reducing by roughly half the license fee it pays for the declining legal drama, renewed last week for an eighth season.

Spared in the cost-cutting cast-slashing were Steve Harris, Camryn Manheim and Michael Badalucco, as well as Jessica Capshaw, who joined the increasingly bombastic show last season.

Gone because of what Kelley called "economic and creative realities" are McDermott, Williams, Boyle, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Marla Sokoloff and recent addition Chyler Leigh, their options for fall not picked up by Kelley's production company and 20th Century Fox Television.

Ironically, the purge came six days after ABC flew McDermott and several other soon-to-be-axed cast members to New York to strut across the stage at Radio City Music Hall as part of the network's big fall schedule announcement gala for advertisers. ABC Entertainment president Susan Lyne proclaimed how great it was to return "The Practice" to the lineup for the 2003-04 season in its old 9 p.m. Sunday slot.

What Lyne left out of her enthusiastic endorsement was that her move of "The Practice" to Mondays this past season hastened a steep ratings dropoff that enabled the network to negotiate a huge drop from the reported $6.5 million per show it had been paying, a cutback that practically ensured a drastic pruning of the show's budget and cast.