In the same NY Times article Robert wrote about there were a few other things that caught my eye:
I guessed earlier that if The Jay Leno Show succeeds, the other networks would try something similar. ABC would seem most likely considering their relative failure (at least vs CBS) weekdays at 10pm. Now here's a bit of confirmation they're thinking about it.
one ABC employee acknowledged that “Nightline,” the late-night ABC News show, has been talked about as a future 10 p.m. possibility.
And the following quote illustrates the continuing public stance of broadcasters unwilling to acknowledge cable network competition, instead claiming their own DVR'd shows are more competition. Sure, people are watching DVR'd shows at 10pm, but *lots* more are watching live cable shows.
Mr. Zucker pointed to evidence showing that the most-watched show at 10 p.m. is TiVo, reflecting the number of people who play back shows using digital video recorders. With so many people in playback mode at 10 p.m., NBC suggests topical comedy, delivered fresh every night, would be an attractive alternative.
The article also has some good quotes from industry insiders on both sides of the "will The Jay Leno Show succeed" divide. Many are self serving predictions (and to the NYT's credit are called out for being such). If I was a big TV producer hoping to sell to the broadcast networks, of course I'd want Leno to fail. If he succeeds, my potential business opportunities just got limited.
read the rest at NYTimes.com.
Why not have Nightline follow Kimmel? Kimmel at 11:35, Nightline up against Fallon and Ferguson.
why would you put kimmel on at 11:30? nightline does great there.
nightline skews old, and it airing first gives kimmel an awkward 12:05 start time
Well I do think that ABC’s 10 PM shows next season are a bit weak, though since a lot are new shows, who knows? Maybe they’ll be like the amazing season that brought them their three current scripted megahits.
The “veteran” shows at 10 PM with decent ratings seem to get them mostly from lead-ins and don’t retain as much as they should of that audience (Bros/Private).
well i bet CBS is laughing
win by default…
what i wanna know is what does NBC consider SUCCEEDS?
is it the ballpark figure Zucker stated?
Is that even a gd number?
I’m guessing that Nightline’s audience likes to be able to tune in right after their evening news. Putting it on after Kimmel would probably mean that many of it’s older viewers had already gone to sleep by then.
I love the networks. The most-watched show is TiVo so TiVo is the problem, not the terrible shows we put on the air.
Why can USA & TNT put out show after show after show that can succeed in hour-long form at 9 & 10pm and the networks (save for CBS) can’t??
because the CBS shows are 90% the same crap.
@sean – because the bar for success in cable is significantly different from broadcast. sure, usa & tnt have “hits” but even usa’s most popular hit is only about half the viewers of a middle-of-the-road network success.
ABC has 20/20 on Fridays at 10, and they air Primetime on Tues or Wed at 10 from time to time during the season, so they’re already 2/5 of the way there. And in the summer they have Primetime on Tues AND Wed.
A Nightline-20/20 style show at ten makes senss for ABC. After a year of paying Sony etc to produce flops, or maybe two years of it, ABC will figure out the growing 18-49 and 18-35 market for better or worse ( live-viewing anyway ) is basic and premium cable and plan accordingly.
To reiterate my views:
For years, the 10pm hour for Fox has been… the FX cable network, and they seem to be doing fine.
As already mentioned above, between 20/20, Primetime, etc. ABC has already run news programs on a significant portion of their 10pm hour for, what, over a decade?
All ABC has to do is stop writing big checks to Sony/WB, and write little checks to themselves to develop cheap dramas on Lifetime. And it is likely only a matter of a couple years before this happens.
CBS, on the other hand, will take at least 5+ years to move to this model, both because they still have profitable 10pm shows (although per episode costs have to be getting up there on the CSIs) and because they lack a broad-demographic cable network to become their new 10pm hour.
@killertv: Don’t you think the USA shows, for example, like Psych, Burn Notice & Monk would have much better ratings if they were on broadcast?
Lets just look at NBC for example…Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals did a better rating with more viewers than any of their shows for the past week. Im pretty sure any of those cable shows would have done better than that with NBC’s promotional backing.
And really my point was that cable shows are a lot BETTER than the network offerings.
@sean, qualitative judgments aside (though for the record, i agree with you), as far as quantifying a hit based on ratings, there is only one real example of a cable hit moving to broadcast, with the repeats of psyche and monk last year after the writers strike affected network offerings. while they were repeats rebroadcasted, they did not perform well at all. while i would argue they would’ve needed double their fanbase to be a network hit, if memory serves (and i could be wrong) they didn’t even get a number of viewers equal to their original cable runs, meaning 1) more people watched it on cable than broadcast and 2) the people without cable that could’ve checked it out on broadcast didn’t. while it’s arguably that a cable hit’s first-run on a broadcast network might be more viewed than on the cable network, it’s unlikely that it would be such a hit as to validate the show as a broadcast hit. i think this is a fortunate thing as the lower bar for cable success means it’s possible for the better quality shows to have more seasons than they would on the nets.
unfortunately i have to disagree with your stanley cup example – live sports events are apples to the oranges of scripted programming.
I think those sponsors trying to decide ( given that profitable web advertising is a long way off, ) between the cable/nbc/fox model and the cbs we own our own crap model are on the horns of a dilemna. Cable is much more of a risk, but the nets are declining so quickly they’re like a cancer patient being given a last-ditch chemo barrage while fondeling their rosaries and gulping Laetrile at the same time. The patient may recover, after all, she isn’t actually dead yet, but … I believe,( and don’t expect visitors to this site, most of whom are much younger than I am, to agree ) that the quality of original programming on USA, FX and Lifetime, etc, is about where the networks were after the notable comedies of the seventies died out. Mainly T and A and stupid James Bond lite fantasies, ( and to update it for the 90′s, bland predictable Wonder Wopman and Bionic Woman sistahs can do it all pabulum.) That goes for the so-called good ones like Burn Notice and the Closer. Cable ratings are as much about the Hills and Flavor Fave as it is ” quality ” drama. The Tyler Perry shows for eg make Urkel and Rerun look like Denzel Washington or Samuel L Jackson. Basic cable only gets ratings because 18-35 and 18-49 viewers hate network TV after ten eastern. I’m glad I listened when my mother said, if you become a salesman I’ll have you killed. ( Just kidding.)
NOOO!!!!!