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Advertisers place their bets for fall TV season
From Correspondent Jill Brooke
July 23, 1997
Web posted at: 11:06 a.m. EDT (1506 GMT)NEW YORK (CNN) -- If NBC's summer TV slogan -- "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you!" -- hasn't revived your flagging interest in reruns, it may be time for you to do as the advertisers do, and start looking ahead to the new fall lineups.
This is the time of year during which advertisers screen all the networks' fall shows to determine which shows will be hits, and decide where to spend their $6 billion budget. They admit that picking hits for the fall season is a crapshoot.
"All hits are flukes. It's probably harder to predict which shows will work versus a decade ago, because of all the competition," said Betsy Frank, the vice president of Zenith Media.
Some shows odds-on favorites
Nonetheless, some shows have emerged as odds-on favorites. At NBC, the bets are on "Veronica's Closet" to be the season's hit. Produced by the Bright/Kauffman/Crane team, which also did "Friends," it lucked out with a programming slot next to "Seinfeld." And, it stars the likable Kirstie Alley as an advice columnist who is unlucky in love.
Clip from Veronica's Closet
448 K/10 sec. QuickTime movie
At ABC, advertisers are high on "Hiller and Diller," in which Richard Lewis and Kevin Nealon portray comedy writers with different styles of parenting. ABC's "Dharma and Greg," a romantic sitcom slated for the perennially weak Wednesday night time slot, is also getting high marks. It pairs a boyish lawyer (Thomas Gibson) with a free-spirit Gen X-er raised by hippies (Jenna Elfman, of the short-lived sitcom "Townies").
Capitalizing on its sci-fi niche, Fox has sparked interest in "The Visitor." Its legal drama "Ally McBeal" has also drawn notice -- its executive producer, David Kelley, also created "Chicago Hope" and "Picket Fences."
And CBS has scored big with the cop drama "Brooklyn South" (by Steven Bochco, who did both "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue") and "George and Leo," a comedy starring Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch.
Of the upstart networks, nobody on UPN's fall lineup had especially impressed the advertisers we interviewed. But WB had some potential winners, Frank said.
"They will get the most attention for a show called 'Dawson's Creek,' which is kind of a teen-age coming-of-age drama and looks like a beautifully produced program," she said.
Several potential sleeper hits
Then, there are the potential sleeper hits, including Fox's "413 Hope Street," about a teen crisis center, NBC's "Players," with Ice-T, and CBS' "The Gregory Hines Show," about a single dad. For advertisers, sleepers are bargains because, as advertising executive Paul Schulman says, "they're not priced to win the time period."
Predicting which shows will be hits has never been an exact science. Over the years, advertisers have gambled that "Bless this House," Steven Spielberg's "Seaquest" and Jackie Mason's "Chicken Soup" would be runaway hits. Instead, the only thing that ran away were the viewers.
But for shows struggling for survival this season, there is some good news, Frank says. "The definition of success just means surviving to the second year. And that is more lenient criteria than ever existed before," she said.
And her profession is giving high odds to this season's lineup to make the grade. Says Schulman, "Some shows may well be worth the gamble."
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