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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, October 27, 2006

COMMENTARY
Is NBC giving up on 'family hour' TV?

By Scott Collins
Los Angeles Times

NBC executives thought "Friday Night Lights" was better than good, and many critics agreed. The show tanked anyway.

NBC

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The music, movie and newspaper industries are undergoing wrenching change in the Internet age, so there's no reason to believe network TV should be immune to the malaise sweeping old media. But will prime time's "family hour" wind up a casualty?

In announcing steep layoffs and cost cuts last week, NBC Universal said its main broadcast network would chuck expensive sitcoms and dramas during the early evening — such as this season's ratings-challenged "30 Rock" and "Friday Night Lights" — and instead devote the first hour of prime time to relatively cheap game and reality shows, such as Howie Mandel's "Deal or No Deal" and Bob Saget's new "1 vs. 100."

"The audience just isn't there," NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright explained to the Los Angeles Times. "We have some of our best stuff at 8 o'clock (Pacific and Eastern; that's the 7 p.m. slot for Hawai'i programming), and it's struggling."

So the peacock network, which finished No. 4 in the ratings last season, is going to start kicking off prime time with what executives presumably think is their, uh, less-than-best stuff. That's a big retreat from a company that not so long ago boasted blue-chip hits such as "Friends" in that hour. The new plan runs counter to the oft-quoted programming mandate of former network chief Grant Tinker, who rescued NBC in the 1980s with fare such as "The Cosby Show": "First, be best; then, be first."

Many people in the TV business are surprised and dismayed to hear NBC executives talking about the first hour of prime time as a kind of desolate, somewhat seedy precinct, where game-show tote boards clatter like Vegas slot machines and a bald man in a suit lurks with a briefcase.

"I just don't like it, for obvious reasons, when a network says, in effect, 'I give up, I'm going to cut costs and put reality shows on,' " said Donald Bellisario, executive producer of the military crime drama "NCIS," which continues to perform well launching prime time for CBS Tuesday nights, even against monster competition such as Fox's "American Idol." "This is how you wither up and die."

TV historian Tim Brooks, a research executive for the Lifetime cable networks, put it this way: "For NBC to put its future on doing reality at (that hour) because it works financially sounds like the GE financial people are overruling the creative people." General Electric is the parent company of NBC Universal.

"There's totally life at (that hour). All you need is a good program," said Shari Anne Brill of New York-based ad firm Carat USA. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. NBC executives, for instance, thought "Friday Night Lights" was better than good, and many critics agreed. The show tanked anyway.

But fans don't need to worry — not yet, anyway — that "Lights" or "My Name Is Earl" is about to be booted for an infomercial. Sometimes TV executives trumpet silly decisions that they quietly reverse later, when business conditions or corner-office occupants change.

(An NBC spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.)

But however unpopular the gambit may be, NBC is correct on a crucial point: Increasing competition from cable TV and the Internet, as well as digital video recorders that allow users to skip commercials, is killing the financial assumptions that have guided the TV business for the past 50 years.

If the traditional broadcasters are to save themselves, the main argument boils down to a question of investment. Should the networks respond to the new environment by cutting their losses and surviving as leanly as possible, as NBC seems to be doing?

Or is now the time that executives should be investing heavily in development, trying to suss out the next generation of hits that will enable them to stem the encroachment of new media?