Goodbye to The Mass Audience

By Richard Zoglin

Bored with the fall TV season? Tired of matching wits with Jeopardy contestants? Take a crack at these brainteasers:

ABC's Twin Peaks, in its new Saturday-night time slot, is languishing in 75th place in the ratings for the season to date, averaging a paltry 16% share of the viewing audience. Yet ABC's chief of programming hails the show as "a great ratings success." Why?

Fox's hit The Simpsons is battling NBC's The Cosby Show in a head-to-head matchup on Thursday nights. But no one can quite agree on who is winning. The Cos trounces Bart's clan each week in the Nielsens, but Simpsons boosters claim their show is the real winner. Who's right?

Cop Rock, the fall's most ballyhooed experiment, has sunk to near the bottom of the ratings pack. ABC has considered trying it in a new time period, perhaps switching it with Gabriel's Fire, another new series doing poorly. But both shows have been left in place for now. How come?

The answers go to the heart of the tidal change that is transforming network television. Old verities, like the Nielsen ratings, are no longer holy writ. Shows that a few years ago would have been canceled are today being acclaimed as hits. Programmers who once juggled schedules at the drop of a Nielsen decimal point are now making those moves warily. And everybody is wondering whether television's mass audience -- those huge blocs of viewers who used to assemble in front of the set for shows like I Love Lucy and All in the Family and Roots -- has dispersed for good.

Sure, cable, independent stations and VCRs have been eating away at the network audience for much of the past decade. The remote-control device too has made viewers pickier: shows that don't grab their attention are zapped away in an instant. But the networks' woes have accelerated alarmingly this fall. Of the 22 shows introduced by ABC, CBS and NBC, not a single one is a bona fide hit. (The only new show that ranks in the Nielsen Top 30, America's Funniest People, is merely an appendage of an already established hit, America's Funniest Home Videos.) The three networks' combined share of the viewing audience -- more than 90% just a dozen years ago -- hit another air pocket this fall, dropping 4 percentage points from a year ago, to 66%. On Saturday nights, when TV viewership is at a low ebb, nearly half the audience is tuned in to something other than the Big Three.

| The economic slump is making matters worse. The ad market this fall has plummeted, with commercial time selling for an estimated 30% less than it fetched in the "upfront" buying last spring. As a result, the networks are making schedule changes only reluctantly. Reason: switching a show's time period forces the network to resell the commercial time -- and in the current depressed market, that could mean a substantial money loss, even if the ratings go up.

The Big Three are not the only ones tasting failure this fall. Fox, the scrappy fourth network that introduced nine shows this season, has come up with no new winners either. The fall's new syndicated programs -- game shows like The Challengers and Trump Card, magazine shows like Personalities -- are foundering as well. A malaise seems to have gripped the TV audience; viewers are clinging to old favorites, reruns and their trusty remote-control buttons. The No. 1 network show this season is Cheers, now in its ninth season. The top show in syndication is still Wheel of Fortune, which has been around for 16 years.

Explanations for the frustrating fall vary. The Civil War, a surprise ratings hit on PBS, took a big chunk out of the audience for one week. Sunday- night football and other programming on cable have taken another bite. The World Series, one of the few events that can still draw blockbuster audiences to the networks, ended in a disastrous (for CBS as well as the Oakland A's) four-game sweep. Some network executives, meanwhile, contend that a host of scheduling gimmicks and promotional ploys created too much confusion for the viewers. NBC, for example, ran several premier episodes twice, in a gimmick it called double pumping.

And there are those who blame the programming. "The networks have lost audiences because they've lost touch with the American viewer," says Gene DeWitt, who heads a New York media-consulting firm. "They haven't delivered programs that viewers want to watch." To be sure, nothing the networks tried this fall seemed to work: not the "innovative" shows, like Cop Rock and Hull High; not the blatant attempts to court young viewers, like Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis Can't Lose; not even the slick and usually reliable formula sitcoms, like Lenny and The Fanelli Boys.

Network executives, not surprisingly, dispute these gloomy analyses. Each can point to a series or two that is doing passably in the ratings or a night that has experienced an uptick. CBS entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky insists that it is too soon to write off the fall shows; most network hits, he points out, take a season or two to find their audience. "I don't know of any quality adult shows that exploded out of the gate," he says.

But the fact remains that the audience is fragmenting, network shares are shrinking, and programmers are scrambling to learn the rules of a new, more competitive game. It was probably inevitable. "The norm in any business is competition," says ABC research chief Alan Wurtzel, "so we shouldn't be surprised that as people have more choices, they will use them. People used to watch shows they didn't really like because they had no alternatives. They don't have to do that anymore."

The networks have already made one major adjustment in their strategy. If huge audiences can no longer be expected, the goal is to reach the right audience -- that is, the one that will attract the most ad dollars. The demographic group most in demand among advertisers is adults between 18 and 49. That is why Twin Peaks (which does well among those viewers) is not in danger of cancellation and why the Cosby-Simpsons face-off has produced a split decision. (Cosby is watched by more women 18 to 49; The Simpsons wins among men 18 to 49.)

Some industry observers feel the networks have gone too far in their pursuit of the young and restless. A broadcast network cannot survive, they argue, by aiming shows at small segments of the audience. "If the networks continue to program 15-share shows, they'll be out of business," says Fred Silverman, the former network programmer who now produces such old-fashioned (and old- skewing) hits as Matlock and Jake and the Fatman.

To avert such a disaster, the networks are looking for ways to reduce programming costs. Reality shows like NBC's Unsolved Mysteries and CBS's Top Cops are becoming more common, partly because they are cheaper to produce. Other cost-saving measures may be on the way: co-productions with overseas broadcasters, more live programming, and series that air more than once a week (an idea NBC flirted with for its new sitcom Parenthood). Meanwhile, the multipart mini-series, once a staple of the "sweeps" periods, has been virtually abandoned because of its exorbitant cost.

The main challenge for the networks, however, is to find ways of wooing back viewers who seem bored by the sameness of network programming. The success of such offbeat shows as The Simpsons and Twin Peaks early this year demonstrated that these viewers will perk up for formula-breaking fare. The result, say many TV producers, has been a rather confused quest for unusual shows. "The question is always, 'Why is this show different?' " says David Gerber, president of MGM/UA Television. "((Network programmers)) are worried that they might get a well-executed show but that it won't be different enough to grab the audience." Says another producer: "The networks seem to have lost their compass. They're crying out for new stuff. But they're not sure what 'new' is or what to do with it when they find it."

In the search for innovation, the networks this fall tried musical shows, with little success. In development for next year are several prime-time animated series (if nothing else, they will look different). Another attention-getting ploy: big stars. Burt Reynolds is back this fall in Evening Shade, and Farrah Fawcett, Ryan O'Neal and Jonathan Winters are among the stars who have shows being readied for mid-season. Most of all, say network programmers, they are looking for high-quality shows that audiences will tune in on no matter how stiff the competition. "We still have a Field of Dreams mentality," says NBC entertainment president Warren Littlefield. "If you build it, they will come."

But will they still come in as great numbers as they once did? Almost certainly not. The era of the mass TV audience may be ending, just as the mass moviegoing audience began to dissipate (lured away by TV) in the years after World War II, and the popular-music audience became fragmented with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. Network TV, of course, is still capable of linking the nation as no other medium can, and the next Dallas or All in the Family might be just around the corner. But more likely, before that new Field of Dreams appears, the networks will face a lot more sleepless nights.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York