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ERIC DEGGANSViewers may be frustrated as the big networks juggle their premiere schedules this fall, changing the familiar TV landscape.
Once upon a time, it was easy to figure out when the new shows started on network television.
The process was as simple as looking at a calendar: Nielsen Media Research, the TV ratings company, marked the start of the fall season, often in the third week of September. The mainline networks debuted the core of their schedules that week in an orgy of programming that packed special editions of TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly and newspapers everywhere.
Except for a few scattershot programs here and there, the fall season switched on like a lamp, just in time for viewers returning to autumnal work and school schedules.
Not anymore.
In fact, this fall marks the first time in memory that there may not be a fall season - at least not as we have known it.
Instead of debuting the week of Sept. 20, when the 2004-05 TV season officially starts, most of the 30 or so new prime time shows on the big six networks will premiere throughout September.
Technically, NBC will debut the five shows touted as its new fall series in summer, starting this week to snag a huge post-Olympics viewership and develop a year-round schedule of new programming.
Year-round programming also inspired the suits at Fox. They had planned to stay out of the fall season game entirely, premiering six shows this summer as part of a three-tiered plan of debuts scheduled for July, November and January, developed to avoid pre-emptions for baseball playoffs and the World Series in October.
But many of those July shows have floundered, prompting Fox to schedule a patchwork of reality series and movies in September to plug the holes.
And the changes continue: Some returning favorites, including NBC's The West Wing, ABC's Alias and Fox's 24, won't debut new episodes until October or January. But NBC's high-concept medical comedy, Scrubs, returns Tuesday. Even newspaper and magazine TV listings have a tough time keeping up.
Who could blame viewers for feeling confused?
"The last thing we want to do is confuse the viewer and confuse (TV critics)," Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Universal TV Group, said during a news conference this summer, admitting such fickle scheduling helped kill shows such as The Restaurant this summer.
"I think the fact is . . . good shows win out, and people find the good shows."
Perhaps Zucker should consider the struggles of Fox's critically acclaimed, low-rated sitcom Arrested Development before betting on viewers to discover hidden TV gems.
And unpredictable schedules aren't the only reason this fall season may grind up the network business. Here are some others:
Nobody knows what people want to watch nowadays.
It's true that cluelessness in the TV biz is nothing new: '50s-era network suits resisted allowing Lucille Ball to cast her real-life Cuban husband in I Love Lucy and initially tried to kill off the landmark '70s TV comedy All in the Family.
But the industry's usual uncertainty has exploded as network audiences have gorged themselves on exploitive reality series while avoiding substantive dramas and predictable sitcoms.
Consider this summer. Viewers seeking groundbreaking drama went to cable: FX's firefighter drama Rescue Me, the USA Network's sci-fi masterpiece The 4400 and TNT's taut terrorism miniseries The Grid.
On the networks, Fox's ambitious legal drama The Jury died within weeks, but empty-headed reality fare such as The Simple Life 2, Last Comic Standing and Trading Spouses scored well.
And few insiders predicted that Southern-fried comic Jeff "you might be a redneck" Foxworthy could bring a sketch comedy show for NASCAR dads to the network of Dawson's Creek and Gilmore Girls. But his Blue Collar TV debuted in July to eye-popping numbers, silencing rumors that the network moved the show up from its fall schedule to minimize the impact if it failed.
"I think sometimes, especially in television, we look for things to be so cutting-edge that sometimes we miss the obvious things right in front of us," Foxworthy said during a news conference. "When you get 15 minutes out of every city, people are the same. I used to feel like I was beating my head up against the wall in New York and L.A. trying to explain that."
Quality is no predictor of success.
The industry's two most underachieving networks, fourth-place ABC and World Wrestling Entertainment broadcaster UPN, have fielded the best crop of new shows.
On ABC, Alias creator J.J. Abrams has crafted Lost, an inventive castaway drama; suburban housewives unearth the secret of a friend's suicide in Desperate Housewives; and teen boys struggle with exploding sex drives in life as we know it.
Already glowing with a red-hot summer reality series Amish in the City, UPN tapped hunky Taye Diggs (the only black star of a new drama series) to play an entertainment lawyer forced to raise his dead cousin's daughter in Kevin Hill. And Veronica Mars features a tough teenage girl recovering from date rape while helping her father, a disgraced former police chief, run their family detective agency.
But what shows do industry experts predict will hit big?
CSI's third spinoff, CSI: NY. Friends spinoff Joey. ABC's sleazy-sounding reality show Wife Swap.
The quality drain continues as Everybody Loves Raymond and NYPD Blue notch their final seasons; rumors persist that NBC's award-winning The West Wing is headed for the showers, too.
It's a vicious cycle: As viewers choose more dumbed-down fare on the networks, broadcasters may leave more quality concepts to cable, which is thirsty for distinctive programming to define every channel.
My suggestion to readers: Devote a little more time to watching Lost, Kevin Hill, Veronica Mars, the WB's Jack & Bobby and the handful of other quality shows on the networks - especially if your TV has a Nielsen ratings box attached - because networks are like pets: They respond best to positive reinforcement.
Reality TV is the new face of comedy.
Suggest to network suits that viewers are rejecting situation comedies for reality shows and you'll get an argument.
"The death of the sitcom is a hot topic right now, and I simply don't believe it," said new NBC entertainment head Kevin Reilly, the executive unlucky enough to take over programming after the network lost powerhouse comedies Friends and Frasier. "We're going to reach for the most original ideas and . . . protect the shows with the best lead-ins, and right now, that means reality."
Translation: "We've replaced more sitcoms and dramas with reality shows to protect the shrinking number of successful sitcoms and dramas."
Umm, okay. But isn't that like recruiting a clan of wolves to protect your henhouse?
Fox entertainment president Gail Berman offered a similar rationale while defending Fox's "pre-emption" strategy of debuting reality shows strikingly similar to those announced by rival networks.
For instance, Fox debuted Trading Spouses months before ABC's Wife Swap, and scheduled The Next Great Champ months before NBC's The Contender. NBC eventually filed suit, asking a judge to keep Champ off the air until its claim of intellectual theft can be settled in court. A hearing was scheduled for Sept. 10, then moved up to Sept. 7 when Fox tried to get the show on air before the proceeding.
Berman's defense? The networks always rip each other off.
"There (are) three Amy Fisher movies. There are two (Princess) Diana movies. There is nothing new about this," she said during a news conference in July. "You will see, if you look around the television dial, that many shows look familiar to other shows. That's the way business is done."
But when more than half of prime time viewers last season watched cable instead of the networks, broadcasters' best move might not be to claim that copycatting fuels their business.
The networks have forgotten the value of diversity. Again.
Two network TV shows, Fox's North Shore and NBC's Hawaii, are set in the 50th state, whose population is 50 percent Asian, Pacific Islander and/or native Hawaiian.
Guess how many actors from those ethnic groups are in the core casts of both shows combined?
Three. Among a total of 15.
Narrow the cast to the four or five people in each show who get most of the screen time and the list drops to one: Hawaii's Aya Sumika.
Hawaii star Sharif Atkins, one of two black actors on NBC's ER last season, gamely defended his new show by noting that a large number of guest actors, bit players and peripheral characters are Asian.
"This show . . . will show you a Hawaii that you have yet to see," he said. "It's a Hawaii that Magnum P.I. and even Hawaii Five-O didn't touch on. This show really does capture culturally (what) Hawaii is, good and bad."
That it does so while focusing on a pair of police officers, one black and one white, exemplifies how Hollywood is backsliding on diversity issues.
Outside of UPN, which has made attracting black viewers a core part of its business, no new fall network show features a black star alone (even TV vets such as L.A. Law's Blair Underwood, The Cosby Show's Malcolm Jamal Warner and City of Angels' Hill Harper share billing).
And though Hispanics make up about 13 percent of the population, only two new prime time shows out of 30 feature a significant Hispanic star or co-star (Oscar De La Hoya on Fox's Next Great Champ and Eva Longoria on ABC's Desperate Housewives). Only one returning show, ABC's George Lopez, features a Hispanic as the lead character.
"What you have is very small bites of the apple in which Latinos continue to play peripheral roles and are clearly not central to the plot, with few exceptions," said Felix Sanchez of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts. "We're still on the sidelines. There's just more of us there."
At a time when more of America's youth culture is coming from black and Hispanic sources, a presentation for advertisers in May by the youth-oriented WB network said it all.
Gathered onstage in New York's Madison Square Garden were about 30 stars from all the network's shows. Just one of them was a person of color: 40-something comic Steve Harvey. The explanation offered by WB suits: It was an accident.
"We are openly not happy about the lack of diversity in the (fall) schedule," said WB chairman Garth Ancier, an executive who once shepherded The Cosby Show for NBC and In Living Color for Fox. "We did develop more diverse shows this year. They just didn't make the schedule."
But in a business where trends shift faster every day, the networks may not get many more chances to take control of their industry.