88 replies to this topic

[cutecouple]

An article from SF Gate on Zucker and NBC: "Peacock's feathers are all mussed up". In the history of TV, there are probably few networks which have been singlehandedly taken from first to worst by one executive. NBC might be one of them. Their massive rescheduling and penchant for 'supersizing' has earned the wrath of many TWoPers.

Edited by cutecouple, Feb 2, 2004 @ 9:43 PM.

[Penfold]

Thanks for the link, cutecouple. That's a spot-on article. I'm especially interested in something the article only touched on: the inversely proportional shift in quality between CBS and NBC. Cast your mind back 5 years or so. NBC was unquestionably top dog, and the only people watching CBS were your grandparents. Now look at them.

CBS: CSI. The Amazing Race. Joan of Arcadia. Survivor. Without a Trace. All, in my opinion, quality shows. They've got some clunkers (does anyone really watch JAG or Becker? I guess someone must, but it's nobody I know), but in general someone in programming really knows what they're doing over there.

NBC: shows that have lost their former glory (Will and Grace, West Wing, ER), hit shows that are ending (Friends, Frasier), shows that are great they refuse to promote (Scrubs), shows that suck that they refuse to kill (Good Morning Miami). The Apprentice is fun, but can only last so long. The only show I'd watch regularly on NBC now is Law and Order, and they're really milking that cash cow for all it's worth.

Edited by Penfold, Feb 3, 2004 @ 11:20 AM.

[michelec]

I can't think of a better example of network interference ruining a show than what happened to Homicide: Life on the Street. The first couple of seasons the show was absolute brilliance...multi-dimensional characters, plots that didn't insult your intelligence, and a seamless balance of the detectives' lives in and out of the squadroom. The first red flag was when the suits pressured Tom Fontana to introduce a second female detective (who added absolutely nothing to the show BTW) because they considered the first female detective to be too butch. And from there the tweaking and intereference continued, ultimately leading to half of the cast being replaced by young and pretty no-talents (Jon Seda and Michael Michele I'm looking at both of you), and the focus of the plots becoming less about the cases and more about who was sleeping with who. I was a devoted fan from the first episode but H:LotS had become so unwatchable that had it been renewed I wouldn't have watched it anymore...and don't even get me started about the reunion movie.

Edited by michelec, Feb 3, 2004 @ 1:55 PM.

[DeeJayEnki]

Who the hell changed the zany, frequently funny Parker Lewis Can't Lose into the much more straight-laced teen drama Parker Lewis? Whoever it was, I hope he got fired for that.

[add_duck]

Their massive rescheduling and penchant for 'supersizing' has earned the wrath of many TWoPers.

Wow, what an interesting article. It's a good thing I don't watch too many shows on NBC anymore...even if you liked one of their shows, you'd never be able to find it!

"Supersizing" is the most annoying thing EVER. It screws up VCRs and leads to more commercials. Seriously, is a "supersized" ep any longer than a real episode? Because if it is, what does that do to syndication possibilities? It always seemed to me like the episodes were just crammed with 15 minutes of extra commercials.

[Czeri]

And from there the tweaking and intereference continued, ultimately leading to half of the cast being replaced by young and pretty no-talents (Jon Seda

Jon Seda was hired because Tom Fontana liked him so much on "Oz" and wanted to work with him even after his Oz character was killed.

[kaykath]

Fox vs Firefly. Fox constantly pre-empted Firefly for basketball, messed with the order of the episodes, and played the lovely original pilot LAST!? What did they play first? An episode they gave the writers a weekend to write.

You'd think the network that owes so much to the X-Files would understand the value of patience and creative freedom when it comes to genre shows, heck shows in general for that matter. Since they cancelled every new drama they had last year, I guess not.

edited because apparently even with a dictionary I can't spell

Edited by kaykath, Feb 3, 2004 @ 2:54 PM.

[txm79]

I will always be pissed at Fox for cancelling Space: Above and Beyond. It was the show Glen Morgan and James Wong did. It was on at 6 on Sundays and it was always getting preempted by football and had just a horrible timeslot. I'll be bitter about it forever, and it's been like 8 years since it was on.

[soxom2]

Does anyone know what the relationship between David Lynch and the Suits was for Twin Peaks? Because having severely injured my brain trying to watch a couple of his movies, I wouldn't be at all surprised if TP was at least partly the result of Suits twisting Lynch's arm until he promised to have something resembling a coherent storyline. Which, IMHO, would be one of those rare examples of good network interference.

It doesn't get as much play as Fox vs. Firefly, but what about Fox vs. Keen Eddie? (the thing about tapes is they keep wounds so fresh and raw) It's sort of been forgotten since its more-or-less replacement, The O.C., has turned into such a hit, but... scheduling a quirky, highly adult cop dramedy after American Juniors? What were they thinking? Were they thinking? There was, of course, all the usual non-advertisement of quality, jerking-around-the-schedule, and premature- hiatusing that we all associate with Fox, but American Juniors as a lead-in stands for me as a particularly original bit of network stupidity associated with KE.

michelec, this is totally OT and you probably already know it, but I wanted to share one of my dad's favourite Clark Johnson quotes: asked to comment on Michael Michele's hiring, he said that she was "the best actress in her price range in the greater Baltimore area." Heh.

[jechaplin]

it was always getting preempted by football and had just a horrible timeslot.

Where I live, the UPN affiliate was always preempting its Tuesday lineup for basketball or basesball, depending on the time of year. Basketball annoyed me more since it was usually first runs and baseball frequently repeats. I always had to remember to watch whatever show it was that I liked on the following Friday. One was All Souls (which Kingdom Hospital sort of looks like) don't remember the companion show. Sort of funny, the Season 6 premiere of Buffy, when it first premiered on UPN, the very first episode after she died, conflicted with a baseball game. Then the Indians made it to the playoffs and the normal reair timeslot conflicted with that game. So they moved it back to Tuesday, except at 6p. So we got to see it early, albeit at an inconvenient time.

Sorry for my rambling and digressions.

[suctionprints]

I can't think of a better example of network interference ruining a show than what happened to Homicide: Life on the Street.

Yes, absolutely. Very upsetting, indeed.

I will always be pissed at Fox for cancelling Space: Above and Beyond...It was on at 6 on Sundays and it was always getting preempted by football and had just a horrible timeslot.

That's what they did to Futurama, too. And that show was really hitting its stride.

CBS used to be notorious for moving shows around - that's what helped kill quirky shows like The Flash, Doctor, Doctor and great shows like WKRP in Cincinnati. I can hardly believe it's the network that nutured shows like All In the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to success. Same with NBC - I got quite depressed reading the article. You know that Cheers, Seinfeld and Hill Street Blues woulda died after one season with this regime.

[soxom2]

I love the poll! Interesting that Fox and NBC are neck and neck as of right now - I was under the impression that there was a lot more Fox hatred than NBC hatred. My sense was that Fox has a greater tendency to taunt us with great programs (Firefly, Keen Eddie), then show no patience, killing them long before their time, while NBC suffers more from an inability to find a good show (Boomtown notwithstanding). So where's the NBC hatred coming from? Is the hatred of Boomtown and Homicide fans particularly strong? Or have I just got the whole thing wrong?

Oh, and take a bow CBS! 0!

And I know it's belated, but thanks to cutecouple for that great link.

[UnfamousLoser]

I can't speak for everyone, but part of the reason I'm disappointed in NBC is that in the '80's and early '90's NBC was the network where they took risks and gave their shows time to grow. As someone noted earlier, in its first season Cheers was the lowest rated series in all of primetime television, but Brandon Tartikoff believed in the show and kept it on. Hill Street Blues was also getting miniscule ratings, but NBC stayed with it, and then it started to win every Emmy in sight. Jerry Seinfeld said when the network Audience Tested Seinfeld the show got the lowest audience score ever, but instead of just scrapping the pilot they put Seinfeld on the air and over nine seasons it became the dominant sitcom of the '90's.

Something happened in the mid-90's. Homicide: Life on the Street seemed like it needed a Hill Street Blues plan: quality show, but low rated, so promote the Hell out of it and eventually people will tune in. But NBC, busy promoting Must!See!Thursday!, basically ignored Homicide until season 5, when they inserted Pretty People into the show. They fired Aaron Sorkin from NBC's current shining jewel, The West Wing, and brought in John Wells to turn The West Wing into the sort of middlebrow drama that Wells's other show, ER, has become.

NBC has become safe. I don't watch Survivor, but I admit putting a game show full of unknown people backstabbing each other on primetime was a huge risk for CBS. So is a show about a teenager who talks to God (Joan of Arcadia). (NBC does deserve credit for putting a sitcom with a gay male lead character on the air, but since Will Truman has yet to have a serious boyfriend, I don't give them that much credit). The rumor is their possible solution to dealing with the loss of Friends and Fraser is: another Law & Order.

Edited by UnfamousLoser, Mar 19, 2004 @ 4:32 AM.

[sorority]

To me it was a tie in between ABC and Fox but in the end I voted for ABC.

Because while Fox never promoted, preempted, messed around with some more and then cancelled "Firefly" and my beloved "Keen Eddie", ABC still has all my hate for what they did to "Miracles". Here they had a possible cult hit...and I still believe they KNEW they had a possible cult hit...but they had no idea about what to do with it. Again, they never promoted the show, they preempted it, then they preempted it for two episodes of "The Practice" even though those two episodes they aired weren't even a 2-Parter and in the end they cancelled the show after five episodes. It really hurt me physically to watch them systematically destroy this show.

Plus, it's been years but I still haven't forgiven them for what they did to "Prey".

[daniel82]

My pet "unforgivable" is NBC's awful treatment of their daytime drama, "Another World". AW committed that most awful of sins, being a "quality" show scheduled right after a soap that had a more...shall we say, simplistic view of its audience. NBC had been third in daytime since the late 1970's and when "Days of Our Lives" decided in the mid-1990s to employ sci-fi plots and all sorts of crazy things, it experienced a sort of "drive-by/rubbernecking" jolt in the ratings. The network honchos, like any bad parents, asked AW why they couldn't be more like their younger brother "Days," and demanded that AW try some of those weirdo plots. Never mind that AW was their oldest soap (a ratings powerhouse in the 1970's) and had a rep as an introspective, intelligent show. NBC hired executive producers who would toe the line (in other words, hatchet women), introducing serial killers, models with little acting talent, shape-shifting time travellers (I kid you not), and the like. The people who would eat that stuff up at "Days" had not really watched AW to begin with, and it didn't bring any of them over. All it did was drive away most of the viewers who'd watched it when it was "normal". In primetime terms, it would be like NBC telling ER to "be more like Friends" or get the ax.

NBC shamelessly advertised the plotlines and activities of their other soaps during the late 1990's, but you rarely if ever saw an ad for AW (and never in primetime).
This lack of promotion served as yet another vote of no confidence, despite the fact that AW was pulling a fairly steady 2.5 or so in 1999 (low, but not even the lowest rated on NBC at that time).

The silver lining of this whole cloud, however, is that when NBC pulled the plug on AW and put on the show "Passions" (which was supposed to be more in line with what NBC wanted from its soaps), it was universally panned and is still a source of derision nearly five years later. They got what they wanted--but it came along with a 2.0 rating (on a good week). Meanwhile, AW reruns on SoapNet remind many viewers of times when soaps really were good.

[TheCustomOfLife]

I was just coming over here to post about NBC's shitty treatment of Another World. The only other AW pimping NBC ever did was during DAYS, and I always thought DAYS and AW were for different audiences. As daniel82 said, DAYS' storytelling always seemed to be...how shall we say...easier to digest, even in the good ol' 80's-supercouple days. AW was closer to As The World Turns than Days of Our Lives in that AW was almost more intellectual. The scripts were literate, and the actors knew what they were doing because they were pulled from the best of the best on Broadway. That is, until the mid-'90s, and evil Jill Farren Phelps. But daniel82 has pretty much said everything else better than I could.

[culturevulture73]

Re: NBC

Something happened in the mid-90's.

Unfamous Loser, they lost the man you mentioned, Brandon Tartikoff. He left NBC around 1991 and that was the beginning of the end. The last new show he saved? Law & Order.

The suits would do well to remember that not everything is a hit out of the gate--they tried to cancel L&O every year and it only took off once it was run on A&E in syndication.

X-Files would've been cancelled today.

[rayray]

NBC also screwed with the John Laroquette Show. In its 1st season, it
was a cynical black comedy with likable characters. Then the suits decided
the setting for the bus station had to be in daylight and added Alison LaPlaca
as a new love interest. That killed it for me.

Oh, and sorority, it is good to find another Prey fan out there.

[USCJCF]

So, is it just about scheduling?

I'm annoyed with CBS for its staunch refusal to run anything remotely controversial. See the MoveOn and PETA Super Bowl ads, as well as the Reagan documentary flap from last year. Running away from controversy makes me cranky.

[biakbiak]

The suits would do well to remember that not everything is a hit out of the gate--they tried to cancel L&O every year and it only took off once it was run on A&E in syndication

On the other hand L&O is to blame for a lot of dramas having zero to no character development and the discontinuation of story arcs because serial shows fair poorly in reruns and also in syndication. So, now L&O is the model for new dramas and I think dramas are suffering for it.

Edited by biakbiak, Feb 6, 2004 @ 3:40 AM.

[suctionprints]

NBC also screwed with the John Laroquette Show. In its 1st season, it
was a cynical black comedy with likable characters. Then the suits decided
the setting for the bus station had to be in daylight and added Alison LaPlaca
as a new love interest. That killed it for me.

Yes, I was appalled by that as well. Fox did the same thing for Duet - they could have milked a whole, hilarious season about Ben and Laura making wedding plans. Instead it all happened offscreen, and Alison LaPlaca is brought to the fore. Soon after Duet's gets cancelled, and spun off into a flop sitcom called Open House. I love LaPlaca, but never as much as the suits seem to - haven't they ever heard of the phrase "always leave 'em wanting more"? She's a great character actress, but not a lead. And if they had any clue, the TPTB would realize that. Oh, wait. They don't.

ETA: And what's up with this supersizing of "The Apprentice"? Doesn't NBC know that all the reality TV and Mark Burnett fans are tied up until 8:00? It's "Survivor" night for crap's sake! Thank God I have TiVo, or I would have missed 1/3 of the show. Other folks I know weren't so lucky.

Edited by suctionprints, Feb 6, 2004 @ 9:09 AM.

[tvfanatic23]

looked at this poll for a minute or two before i could think of an answer, but hello? I don't think anyone has mentioned FOX's biggest mistake of all time: cancelling Skin!

[dahlia]

NBC, for moving Scrubs around so much and for milking the long dead cash cow of Friends long after its empty dried out husk was lying in a ditch by the side of the road.

[Mr. Excitement]

biakbiak writes:

On the other hand L&O is to blame for a lot of dramas having zero to no character development and the discontinuation of story arcs because serial shows fair poorly in reruns and also in syndication. So, now L&O is the model for new dramas and I think dramas are suffering for it.

Well, sure, but I hardly think L&O is to blame for too many procedural shows on the air, any more than, say, Buffy is to blame for awful Girlz Kick Ass shows; the actual blame lies with the unimaginative Suits who are the subject of this thread, who-from both the studio and network ends-keep buying them, and market forces caused by audience trends (Is the audience for ER not watching the reruns because Dick Wolf is sending goons with ball bats to break their TVs?).

[Eegah]

I can't go any longer without talking about Comedy Central's treatment of Mystery Science Theater 3000. They bolted an opaque channel logo in the corner despite it covering Crow in the theater, they ran ads for other shows in crawls, and they aired tons of Penn Jilette voiceovers over the end credits, even when specialized stuff like Peter Graves' lines in It Conquered the World were being played. This was especially noticeable in Daddy-O, in which the credits stop and we return to Deep 13 several times, and the voice-over continued through the whole thing.

[timeonmyhands]

My vote goes to Fox. I think they do their best to screw up everything that they can. Family Guy was moved around so often and promoted so badly that no one ever knew when it was on or what it was about. Futurama was cancelled way before its time. Andy Richter Controls the Universe got maybe the worse screw job of them all. This was a great show and they never gave it half a chance. I don't think it was ever on for more then two weeks in a row in the same time slot. They also did a really terrible job of promoting it. It almost seems like Fox wants their best shows to fail!

Oh yeah, word to Eegah on the MSt3K stuff.

Edited by timeonmyhands, Mar 18, 2004 @ 1:11 AM.

[Delali]

I will never, ever, forgive TPTB for the demise of the wonderful Freaks and Geeks. How could they be so, incomprehensibly, stupid?
And yet, Smallville still plagues my screen. Why?