For the last week or so, the television world has come to a stand-still as each of the main broadcast networks held their Upfront Presentations, announcing to advertisers their schedules for the new TV season and hyping their programs. We've devoted a great deal of coverage to it ourselves. And yet, I can't help but feel that this whole thing is meaningless. Upfronts are a dinosaur, a bloated leftover from an obsolete system. Instead of depicting the future of television, they're a remnant of its past and, within five to ten years, they will be radically scaled back or eliminated completely.
Schedules don't matter
Take, for example, what has been the most reported on and scrutinized scheduling move of Upfronts (at least online): Community's banishment to Friday nights. On its face, this is stunning news and, just a few short years ago, it would have meant that a very feverish cult audience would have to delay its weekend plans by an hour or so. But now, what does that actually mean for how you, the viewer, watch Community? How many of you will be watching it Friday at 8:30 on NBC with commercials as it airs live? How many of you watch it on Thursday right now?
The fact is that the way we experience television is changing and a network's schedule is closer to a film's release date. It announces when an episode of television will become available for consumption, rather than set the only parameters within which you can view that episode. I can watch Community on Hulu the next day or wait a few weeks and marathon four or five episodes on my DVR or buy the DVDs when they come out.
Look at that Friday night schedule as a whole. It starts with Whitney, which leads into Community, followed by Grimm and Dateline. Do those four shows have anything remotely in common? Any sort of shared audience? In 2002, a network executive would have been fired for even suggesting that and, while its lack of flow may be due in part to what a mess NBC is, it also speaks to a tacit acknowledgement that people aren't sitting down to a night of television on one channel like they used to. But if the actual TV schedule is not as important as it used to be, surely Upfronts still have some value for showing what is actually going to be on that schedule, right?
The Internet means the news already gets out before Upfronts
I remember spending an entire May morning in 2004 glued to my computer, refreshing The Futon Critic every two seconds to find out if Arrested Development was going to get a third season. When FOX announced at its Upfront presentation that it would, I literally jumped up and down with joy. Given the rise of TV news on the internet, the way it has heightened fan passion and allowed TV audiences to organize Save Our Show campaigns, wouldn't Upfronts have more value?
Well, actually, the passion and intensity of Internet users have made Upfronts more obsolete. Given the fact that anyone who wants can start a TV blog or just a personal Twitter account, news spreads quickly. And, given the value of breaking TV news, pick-ups and cancellations are released earlier each year. By last Friday, we already knew that Community, Happy Endings and Touch were coming back, while The Secret Circle was cancelled. We knew Mindy Kaling and Matthew Perry's shows would be airing in the fall, and we even knew that 30 Rock's next season would be its last.
In short, we already knew everything the networks were going to say days in their Upfront presentations days before they happened. Every important pick-up and cancellation was known last week and, thanks to internet, a legion of fans and bloggers were ready to spread the word. While this media landscape creates the potential for misinformation to spread, like the false reports of Community's demise, the actual news got out quickly and snuffed out the lies. Why are the networks spending lots of money to put on a lavish ceremony? The advertisers, of course. The people who are actually paying for these shows fly out to hear the networks' pitches and decide where to invest their ad dollars. But this is a process that the average viewer cares less and less about. In the future, perhaps the networks will move to pare down their presentations, getting the news parts out of the way early and then simply holding private sessions to fete advertisers.
The changing TV landscape
Before, Upfronts used to be the grand unveiling for what you would be watching the following fall. However, as viewership fractures, more and more people are fleeing the major networks for the niche markets of cable. Why should NBC's presentations matter more than TBS or Lifetime when the line between the major networks and cable is diminishing (especially in the 18-49 demo that advertisers care about).
Additionally, television is moving away from the 22 episodes spread out over eight months model of programming. As reruns do worse and costs rise, networks are starting to see the value in picking up a lot more shows for shorter spans (like the 13 episode runs that so many shows seem to be getting next fall) and running them uninterrupted. As a result, there is even more flux in a network's schedule than there used to be. Networks will shuffle things around and bring in new shows at midseason (indeed, FOX is holding back the new drama it is most excited about until January) and, by the time some of these series air, no one will remember what the network was saying about them in May (and they will probably look radically different anyway). So why get fired up about a schedule that, in all honesty, is not going to stay this way for too long (if at all)? And why do this presentation once in May when shows are constantly rolling out?
Upfronts are leftover from an antiquated system, a time when a show premiered in September, ran new episodes mostly during "Sweeps," and filled the time in between with repeats. That time is mostly over and, as networks begin to more fully explore how best to respond to these changes, Upfronts will look more and more like a thing of the past.
---
Follow me on twitter @jonahgardner
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment!