Savor the irony: TiVo, the spearhead of the we-don't-need-no-stinking-commercials movement that is threatening to kill off network television, says it's disappointed in the nets for not adjusting to "this enormous challenge facing the television industry."
As part of the manic Nielsen urge to count everything -- someday, I'm convinced, the company will attach little black boxes to your lawn to count the leaves of grass there -- they've released a new study that shows that average U.S. home gets 118.6 channels. But the average household only tunes in to 16 of those channels, which explains why a lot of folks are interested in so-called a la carte pricing for cable, in which they would only for the specific channels they order.
Another interesting fact hidden away in the study: Black viewers watch way more TV than anybody else. The average black household watches the tube for 45 hours and 22 minutes a week, compared to the overall American average of 31 hour and 55 minutes. Why that's significant: It accounts for the disappearing black sitcom. Sponsors decided they could do without The Bernie Mac Show, Girlfriends, The Hughleys, The Steve Harvey Show, and My Wife And Kids because they get their messages in front of black viewers on other shows.
Tuesday night's announcement that the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) has reached a tentative contract deal with the studios is less significant than it might sound -- and it by no means guarantees that Hollywood actors won't go on strike this summer. The stronger, and much more militant, Screen Actors Guild hasn't agreed to anything yet. And SAG has made it clear from the beginning of contract negotiations that it will go its own way. In fact, SAG often seems to regard AFTRA as the enemy rather than a fraternal union. Just Tuesday SAG sent a letter to its members
attacking AFTRA for holding "confidential sessions'' to bargain with the studios.
The smaller AFTRA represents soap-opera actors, TV weathermen, musicians, reality show hosts, announcers and other performers on the periphery of television production, about 70,000 in all. SAG's 120,000 members include everybody else, including most film and TV actors. (About 44,000 people belong to both unions, which means the number of Hollywood workers exclusively represented by AFTRA is only about 26,000.) They've been squabbling for some time now over jurisdictional issues -- particularly AFTRA's claim that SAG is trying to poach some of its soap-opera actors.
Meanwhile, SAG is also fighting battles internally. Because a SAG membership card is required for even a bit part in most Hollywood productions, thousands of SAG members are really limo drivers, bartenders, or waiters rather than career actors. One faction within SAG wants to exclude these so-called "middle class actors'' from any strike vote. Another faction says protecting the weakest members is exactly what unions are all about. The feud has turned rather bitter during the past couple of months, with petitions and counter-petitions circulating all over Hollywood.
With all that going on, it's easy to lose sight of the actual issues on the table at the negotiations with studios. The big one, just as it was in the writers' strike that shut down TV production for three months at the beginning of the year, is dividing the pot of revenue from DVDs, on-line screenings and other new digital media. Both the writers and directors have already negotiated settlements with the producers on these issues, which you'd think would provide a good model for SAG -- but Hollywood labor negotiations often have more to do with machismo than good sense.
So there's still a good chance of a strike when SAG's contract with the studios expires at the end of June. The fear is great enough that almost no new movies have started shooting during the past several weeks because studios don't want production suspended by a strike. Some TV producers have gone the opposite route, rushing into production ahead of the usual schedule in order to get some shows completed for the fall season. Bottom line: We may have a second consecutive TV season wrecked by a strike. SAG, which suspended negotiations with the studios on May 6, is scheduled to resume them Wednesday. Stay tuned.
The upfronts -- the annual ritual when broadcast television networks present their fall lineups to advertisers -- have always been a weeklong festival of Barnumesque bluster lubricated by liquor and advertising dollars. But the party lights were much dimmer at this year's edition, which ended Thursday.
A palpable cloud of anxiety hangs over a broadcast industry that's down five million viewers from last year, has just crawled out of the wreckage of one disastrous strike and now faces the real possibility of another. Even the invincible American Idol is showing wear and tear with its lowest ratings in five years. And now, the networks have ordered only 17 new series -- about half of what they did last year. Read the whole Miami Herald story.
NBC wants to use its telecast of the 2009 Super Bowl as a platform to launch the new season of Saturday Night Lights, so the show's third season won't start until sometime next February. But you can watch it four months earlier if you subscribe to Direct TV's satellite service. New episodes of Friday Night Lights -- the same ones NBC will show in 2009 -- will begin airing on Direct TV's channel 101 on Oct. 1.
A couple of months ago, when it looked like a second season of marginal ratings had doomed Friday Night Lights, Hollywood was abuzz with gossip that it would move to Direct TV, which is hoping to lure customers away from satellite rival Dish Network with original programming. Apparently that was too expensive a proposition for Direct TV, and instead an agreement was hammered out to split production costs with NBC. "We're beyond thrilled that we have structured an innovative deal that allows us to continue to produce and air this beloved series,'' said NBC programming boss Ben Silverman in announcing the return of Friday Night Lights.
Silverman called the deal "a win-win for NBC, Universal Media Studios and Direct TV, not to mention the many passionate fans who adore Friday Night Lights." No doubt about the fans; whatever happens later, they at least get a third season of original episodes. As for everybody else, we'll see. How many new subscribers will this really bring to Direct TV? And how many viewers will still be left by the time Friday Nights Lights begins airing on NBC, especially with bootleg copies recorded from Direct TV zipping all around the Internet?
When I talked to David Carradine last week while working on a story about how older TV stars are doing startlingly well right now despite working in a medium that's obsessed with finding younger viewers, he admitted the paradox has crossed his mind. He thought about it a great deal on the set of The Golden Boys, a film scheduled for release in the next few weeks in which the 71-year-old Carradine plays a romantic lead opposite Mariel Hemingway.
"I wonder, ‘Where's the appeal of this,' '' Carradine told me. "But it's been showed a couple of places now and it had a huge audience response. Somebody explained to me that the Baby Boomers are getting old, and they'd like to see a movie about themselves. They aren't that interested in seeing a movie about kids trying to get a date. The idea of a movie about an older man falling in love and getting married appeals to them."
That's fine in movies, where producers are simply trying to lure in anyone with the price of a ticket, as opposed to TV, where they have to please demographics-obsessed advertisers. But Carradine doesn't have any trouble getting TV roles, either. His latest, that of a martial-arts-trained zen master (does that ring any bells?), airs Wednesday night on the new Hallmark Movie Channel: Son Of The Dragon.
"It's a dream of a character," says Carradine. "I had not actually read the script when I said I was interested in doing it. They said ‘It's based on The Thief Of Baghdad and [chuckle] I knew what that was. I didn't think there was any hopes of me playing the Doug Fairbanks part, but it just sounded like the greatest idea."
Carradine plays a soldier who comes out of a peaceful retirement to stage a grand jewel theft that involves a series of cons and deceptions. Because he's playing a character playing a character, he deliberately hams it up, which Carradine says was a lot of fun.
"I get to overact, because I'm supposed to be acting, and that's something nobody has ever accused me of," he says. "Part of my mystique is I try never to let you catch me acting. That's what the critics always say, anyway -- that I'm reserved and quiet and holding back. To a certain extent, it's true, but they say it whether I'm playing an Oklahoma folksinger [Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory] or the guy who started the Civil War [plantation owner Justin LaMotte in North And South] or a Chinese-American martial arts monk."
That monk, Kwai Chang Caine, is the role that most resonates with Carradine's name. He was the lead character in Kung Fu, the smash hit ABC martial-arts Western that aired from 1972 to 1975. Carradine has revisited the character or his clones countless times in TV sequels, movies and most recently in a series of phonebook commercials.
The character's eternal fascination to audiences, Carradine thinks, is linked to the fact that the show went out on top. The decline that led to its cancellation was not in Nielsen ratings but in Carradine's interest.
"To be honest, I didn't know when I was doing the show that it was so popular," he recalls. "I was so busy -- I was working an enormous number of hours, living in a little cabin on a hill with no TV set, no newspaper or magazines. I didn't know the show was popular -- I hardly knew anything about anything at the time. In the final season, I guess, it was pointed out to me that we had been running in the top four Nielsen shows since the first episode.
"But I left anyway. I walked. I had had always intended to do Kung Fu for three years. They used to say that you do a TV show for one season, there's kind of a stigma attached -- you failed. You do it two years, you're a success. Three years, a hit. Four, you're rich; five, you own the studio. I thought to myself, a hungry fighter's a good fighter. I don't need to get rich; I don't need to play the same character for years. I want to do movies."
Warner Brothers, the studio that produced Kung Fu, and ABC, with aired it, made it easier for Carradine to leave by quarreling with him constantly.
"The network was using us as cannon fodder, placing Kung Fu before any show they wanted to push -- a show that was in trouble, a new show, whatever," he says. "They weren't treating it with the respect it deserved. So I called a meeting in my dressing room and told everybody, ‘Let's throw in the towel.' They did a nice job of wrapping it up -- he finds his long-lost brother and the story is over."
Carradine was determined to leave Kwai Chang Caine behind that he deliberately chose a karmic opposite for his character: the murderous, gladiatorial race-car driver Frankenstein in the cult flick Death Race 2000. "It didn't work," he laughs. "There is nothing I can do to wipe that guy out."
The Writers Guild has informed its members that it is close to nailing down a contract agreement with studios. "We anticipate that we will be able to present the terms of that agreement to you in the next few days,'' the Guild said in a letter to its members. "In order to have a full discussion with you of the terms and how they were reached, and in order to get your input before making recommendations or decisions, we have scheduled membership meetings for current-active members only for this Saturday, February 9, in New York and Los Angeles." Of course, any agreement would have to be ratified by the Guild's members, and there are a lot of hotheads among them.
The lack of public fussing by either striking writers or the studios since they resumed informal talks last week had seemed like good news -- when name-calling subsides, it's usually because negotiations are getting serious. But the past couple of days, temperatures have risen again. Prominent Writers Guild official Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of Field of Dreams, called for the union to take a tougher bargaining position. At the same time, Screen Actors Guild officials have attacked the deal that the directors' union reached with studios last month, which is the template for talks between the studio and the writers. Meanwhile, CBS boss Les Moonves is reportedly angry that union officials have been badmouthing his company in meetings on Wall Street. It's hard to know what's going on inside the negotiating room, but none of this stuff the past few days is a good sign.
The networks are starting to show some of the tricks by which they hope to survive the writers' strike if it stretches out to the horizon. One was completely predictable: reality shows, which don't require writers. CBS on Tuesday ordered two more rounds of Survivor for next season.
More surprising was the news that CBS is turning to Canada to break the strike. The network announced it's bought 13 episodes of a new cop show tentatively titled Flashpoint. It's being written and produced in Canada and will be shown simultaneously on CTV, Canada's biggest private English-language network. Though Canadian writers are unionized, their contract is still in force and they aren't part of the Hollywood strike that's about to enter its fourth month.
Even before the strike, the broadcast networks were actively seeking shows overseas. (NBC's programming boss, Ben Silverman, has practically made a career out of adapting foreign TV shows to the U.S. market.) The pace of their search is likely to accelerate, and Canada -- as close a thing as there is to a cultural clone of the United States -- is likely to increasingly be the hunting ground.
Hollywood's striking writers and the big studios have taken a highly publicized step toward a settlement with Wednesday's resumption of informal talks. (The fact of the talks was highly publicized; their content is secret -- both sides have agreed to a 10-day news blackout.) Less noticed were announcements from two TV networks that they're curtailing their development of new shows for next season. Both Fox and The CW said they are canceling orders for some of the scripts for pilots that they placed before the strike began. Neither network offered any numbers, but it seems clear that even if the strike ends in the reasonably near future, next season has already been significantly impacted. The networks will have significantly fewer choices to cobble together their fall schedules.
There may not be an Oscar ceremony if the Hollywood writers' strike continues, but the announcement of the nominees -- which is more of a news event than a ceremony, without any scripted patter -- should go on pretty much as normal on Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. And you can watch it live at oscar.com, which will carry not only streaming video of the announcements but bios, clips and other information on this year's nominees; a red carpet section with photo galleries from past ceremonies; a section on Oscar fashion; and another on Oscar history.
The deal that the Directors Guild of America signed with Hollywood's major studios Thursday could break the logjam in studio negotiations with striking writers. The new contract with directors gives them a much bigger share of the income generated by new digital media -- the Internet, cell phones and the like. That's been the major economic issue in the writers' strike.
But even if talks resume (the studios have suggested informal discussions before returning to the negotiating table, an approach that smoothed the bargaining with the directors), they won't necessarily yield quick results. For one thing, the writers have other demands -- particularly that producers and editors of reality shows be covered by any new contract. That was the point over which negotiations broke down in December. The whole point of reality shows, as far as the studios are concerned, is that they're cheap, and the studios want to keep them that way. If the writers are serious about this demand (and some writers have told me they don't really believe it's a deal-breaker), it won't be easy to resolve.
The other problem is that the writers' strike has become personal, with both sides engaging in acts of petty meanness -- the studios refusing to buy tickets to the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony for producers (who are also mostly members of the striking Writers Guild), the writers marching with picket signs that include the home addresses and phone numbers of studio heads.
The writers are also clearly resentful that the studios preferred dealing with the Directors Guild. There's not a great deal of love lost between the two unions in recent years; the writers believe the directors suckered them into a bad deal on income from DVDs during the last strike, in 1988. And they also think that it was their sacrifice -- going on strike -- that enabled the directors to painlessly strike Thursday's deal with the studios. The statement the Writers Guild issued at the news of Thursday's deal didn't exactly brim with fraternal love: "For over a month, we have been urging the conglomerates to return to the table and bargain in good faith. They have chosen to negotiate with the DGA instead."
Bottom line: Thursday's news was the first tangible evidence that the writers' strike won't go on forever. But it's still going to be a while before the TV industry gets back to work.
The Peoples' Choice and Golden Globes awards shows were downgraded to little more than press conferences when striking TV writers refused to work on them and put up picket lines to keep actors away. Now it looks like the Grammys (scheduled for Feb. 10) and the Oscars (Feb. 24) will be the next to go.
The Recording Academy, which stages the Grammys, on Tuesday asked the writers' union to permits its members to work on the show, and was promptly told a waiver was unlikely. Meanwhile, Gil Cates, who produces the Oscar ceremony for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, met with studio publicists and disclosed that he's drawing up two sets of plans -- one for a full ceremony in case the strike is settled, one for a stripped-down version if it isn't. The stripped-down version, publicists say, would rely heavily on pre-taped interviews, much as the Peoples' Choice awards did.
At least a couple of media companies have signaled that they don't think the Hollywood writers' strike is ending any time soon. The FX cable network and ABC Studios have announced that FX's hit drama Dirt, starring Courteney Cox as a ruthless tabloid editor, will return for its second season on March 2 -- but only for seven episodes instead of the planned 13. That's all they were able to get shot before the strike began in November. If either FX or ABC Studios believed the strike was ending any time soon, the premiere of Dirt would have been pushed back until the full 13 episodes were available. Now keep your eye on another FX show, The Riches, a comedy-drama about a family of gypsy grifters. It, too, got about half of its second season shot before production shut down. Launching The Riches for just half a season would be a strong sign that FX and its corporate bosses at Fox think the strike is really headed for the long haul.
Late-night TV comes back to life Wednesday with five hosts -- Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Dave Letterman and Craig Ferguson -- doing their first new shows since Hollywood writers went on strike Nov. 5. Opening night headliners: Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Leno's show, comedian Robin Williams on Letterman's.
Letterman and Ferguson, whose shows are produced by the same company, have reached a deal with the writers' union and will be returning with their writing staffs intact. (Audiences may find that a mixed blessing, since Letterman's writers in particular have made no secret of their plans to use the show as a platform for pro-union propaganda, which could get real old real fast.) The other hosts are returning without writers and will probably have to lean heavily on interviews and musical acts to fill out time ordinarily occupied by monologues and skits -- a problem that could be magnified if A-list guests refuse to cross the writers' picket lines.
Nonetheless, Leno's show could be the best bet of the evening from an entertainment standpoint. What happens when Huckabee and his Secret Service detachment cross the picket line on their way to the show? And what will the Secret Service agents do if striking writers infiltrate the audience and disrupt the taping, as they did last month when Carson Daly returned to his NBC show for the first time since the strike began?
It looks like late-night TV will back at full strength on Jan. 2. ABC's Jimmy Kimmel has announced he'll return with live programs that night, joining NBC's Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, also coming back on the same date. And David Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants (which also owns Craig Ferguson's wee-hours show) says it expects to have strike a deal with the writers in time for a Jan. 2 return as well.
If Worldwide Pants' negotiations are successful, Letterman and Ferguson's programs would be the only late-night shows (including Last Call With Carson Daly, which is already back in production) to be using its regular writing staff. Another advantage: More stars to choose from, since they would be able to appear on Letterman or Ferguson's shows without crossing a writers' picket line.
NBC announced Monday that even though the writers' strike is continuing, its late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien will return to the air on Jan. 2. Somehow or other -- the network didn't explain it -- they'll do their shows without writers. That will mean NBC's full late-night schedule is back on the air: Last Call With Carson Daly returned to production a couple of weeks ago.
Meanwhile, executives at Worldwide Pants, the company that produces Dave Letterman's show, confirmed that they're interested in negotiating a deal with the Writers Guild separate from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the industry alliance that's been directing the contract talks. The writers announced over the weekend that they'll try to outflank the AMPTP by signing agreements with individual companies. That may work with Letterman's show, wholly owned by the relatively small Worldwide Pants. But because most prime-time shows are owned either by the networks or the big studios who are the cornerstone of the AMPTP, it seems unlikely that divide-and-conquer will be successful for the writers as an overall strategy. The strike will not end anytime soon.
The first shows to go dark when Hollywood's writers went on strike were the late-night variety programs. Viewers soon grew bored with reruns, and a couple of weeks ago, ABC's Nightline won the late-night ratings battle for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. Last week it happened a second time -- and suddenly the late-night hosts are getting a little worried. One result: CBS is now billing next week's collection of David Letterman reruns as a "best of" series -- "the most memorable appearances by Letterman's favorite women." They include reruns of shows with Madonna, Cher, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Drew Barrymore.
UPDATE: Worry may be turning to panic. Variety reports that Letterman and other late-night hosts are getting ready to return to work.
If eyeballs and ears were votes, the presidential nominees would be Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The Nielsen Company says those two have aired far and away more radio and TV ads than any of their competitors in the presidential campaign. By mid-November, Romney had placed 17,849 commercials this year, more than four times all the other Republican candidates combined. And Obama's 10,311 ran far ahead of runner-up Hillary Clinton's 7,839 among the Democrats.
The latest round of talks between writers and TV bosses broke down over the weekend with a lot of bad-mouthing on both sides. No further negotiations are expected until after the first of the year, and it's starting to seem unlikely that this season's scripted dramas will resume. Given the time it takes to write new scripts, then produce the actual shows, unless there's a prompt settlement right after the holidays, the networks may seriously consider giving up on dramas for the rest of the season. Sitcoms, which work with a shorter lead time, probably have a little more breathing space.
But they, too, face another unspoken threat: that all the reality and game shows the networks plan to introduce after the first of the year to fill dead air will find an audience. If those shows, which are so much cheaper to produce, draw large numbers of viewers, the networks -- particularly NBC and The CW, already battered by low ratings -- may decide to drastically cut back on scripted shows.
At least one of the various labor problems plaguing television has been settled peaceably. ABC has just signed a new four-year contract with the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, the union that represents newswriters, engineers and some other workers -- about 1100 in all -- at the network's owned-and-operated affiliates in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Though the talks took 10 months (the old agreement expired in March) and there have been rumblings of a strike during the past few weeks, the employees never actually walked out.
When WFOR-CBS 4's Maggie Rodriguez left Miami for New York and an anchor slot on the weekend version of the CBS early-morning news, it seemed a good bet that her husband Mike, the general manager of WSCV-Telemundo 51 would soon be following. And now he has: He's Telemundo's new vice president for sales. No word yet on who will replace him at WSCV.
Want to know what's going on with the Writers Guild strike -- at least from the writers' point of view? Here's a blog set up by the union's East Coast members.
Fox has announced that 24 won't rejoin its schedule in January as originally scheduled. Not enough 24 scripts were completed before the Writers Guild strike began.
Don't expect the Writers Guild strike that began Monday to have much impact on Spanish-language television. "We are not currently being affected by the strike," said a spokeswoman for the Miami-based Telemundo network. "Telemundo is not a signatory to the Writers Guild basic-minimum agreement."
Miami media consultant Julio Rumbaut, who works closely with Spanish-language TV, said almost none of the telenovelas that dominate its programming are written in the United States. "The writers for Televisa, which supplies Univision, are mostly in Mexico, and the writers for Telemundo mostly in Mexico," Rumbaut said. "So there really isn't going to be much effect on them from the strike."
It sure sounds like Hollywood screenwriters will go on strike Monday. Thursday night's closed-door meeting of the Writer's Guild was reportedly full of strike rhetoric, with writers booing and hissing when their officers mentioned concessions they'd offered to the studios to get negotiations on a new contract moving. "Take it all back!" one writer yelled. The writers are demanding a bigger cut of the revenue from DVDs, downloads and other digital byproducts of movies and TV shows.
The last strike, in 1988, lasted 22 weeks. (Remember how the networks plugged holes in their schedules with stuff like a remake of the Mission Impossible series, using old scripts?) Most observers think this one will be longer and more bitter: The writers think they settled for too little in 1988, and the studios are now mostly owned by conglomerates with plenty of cash reserves to keep them above water during a strike.
If there's a strike, the late-night shows of Jay Leno, David Letterman and other hosts will disappear almost immediately -- they're written on a day-by-day basis. (Same goes for Saturday Night Live.) Dramas and comedies will probably continue normally until sometime around February -- the producers already have several episodes in the can, and several more completed scripts that they can continue shooting.
Like cockroaches scuttling around in the ruins of a nuclear war, reality and game shows will not only survive but thrive. They're edited together rather than written, so the strike won't affect their production. That's why Fox will be in the best shape of any network during a strike: Can you say American Idol? Not to mention Cops and Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader? Even a ratings dog like The Next Great American Band is likely to seem appealing in a landscape full of reruns. Hey, I wonder if this blog could be made into a reality show? Are You Smarter Than A TV Critic? has a nice ring to it.
The Writers Guild of America, the union for Hollywood screenwriters, has just voted overwhelmingly -- 90 percent in favor -- to authorize a strike anytime after November 1. This strike talk has been bubbling for a while, but most Hollywood people thought it wouldn't hit critical mass until sometime next year, when the contracts for directors and actors also come up for renewal and the three unions could join together in one (they hope) powerful bloc. Now, though, the LA Weekly's well-informed columnist Nikki Finke reports that there's increasing sentiment among the writers for a strike sooner rather than later, and network bosses are hissing "Bring it!'' because they think their fall season has already tanked. The issue at hand: What cut, if any, writers get from the new revenue stream flowing from the digital world: downloads of TV shows and movies to computers, cell phones and that little chip the Department of Homeland Security secretly implanted in your brain last year.
The last strike, in 1988, lasted 22 weeks, cost the industry half a billion dollars (real money even by Hollywood standards) and gave us such unforgettable shows as the remake of Mission Impossible, produced from old scripts. This time we could be looking at a much longer break, with both sides leaving a trail of scorched video in their wake: the flinty network bosses using cheapie, unscripted reality shows to fill the airwaves, while writers hurl themselves over the cliff like a pack of nerdy lemmings. I have seen the future, and it looks like Kid Nation.
As they used to say in Vietnam, sometimes you've got to destroy the village in order to save it.
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