The New TV Season: Burning Questions Answered!
Kate Walsh by Eric Ogden/ABC
The 2007-08 season is starting soon and there are many questions looming. After consulting a few network insiders, The Biz is going to try to answer a few of the big ones.
Will Private Practice be the next Joey?
Ah, the much maligned spin-off. The answer is no. The audience still has a lot of goodwill towards
Grey's Anatomy. ABC has surrounded it on Wednesday with two of its strongest pilots,
Pushing Daisies and
Dirty Sexy Money. It has a solid night, with
Private Practice as a presold tent pole to hold it up. But expect the veteran cast on
PP to attract an older audience than the
Grey's mother ship.
Will the recent controversy over Kid Nation help or hurt the show?
Help - but only for the first week. "The publicity is not about the show, it's about the making of the show, not about the content," said one exec at a competing network. "Viewers are not going to stay around for three or four weeks just to see if CBS has been doing something unethical." That being said, network research shows that viewers' awareness of the show has risen in recent weeks while the intent to view remains high. In premiere week it's all about a big opening, and
Kid Nation is going to have one.
Is this a make-or-break year for the CW?
You'd better believe it. Last year the network got a pass for being cobbled together from the remnants of the WB and UPN. This season it has clearly defined itself as a hip, young-adult network, and its new shows
Gossip Girl and
Reaper are among the favorites of the ad agencies. So what happens if it doesn't make ratings and revenue progress over last season? "You're going to have to take a serious look at the business model," says one network insider.
Will Mandy Patinkin's departure from Criminal Minds hurt the show's ratings?
Not as much as the fact that
CM's Wednesday-at-9-pm time period is now the most competitive of the week: ABC's
Private Practice, CW's
Gossip Girl, NBC's
Bionic Woman and Fox turning to a proven reality-TV commodity in Gordon Ramsay with
Kitchen Nightmares.
What will be the first show canceled?
"Canceled," of course, is a relative term these days. We saw lots of underperforming shows pulled only to be burned off at fill-in-the-blank.com. So which show will disappear first? It's tempting to say
Viva Laughlin, but CBS isn't launching the show until mid-October. The better bets are ABC's pair of unfunny comedies
Cavemen and
Carpoolers, which could easily be dispatched to make way for a double run of
According to Jim, and NBC's
Life, which has an incompatible lead-in with
Bionic Woman and competition from the established hit
CSI: NY. You can see the headlines already: "Death for
Life."
Who's going to win the ratings race?
The real question is what set of numbers are going to be used to measure success. Advertisers will be getting ratings that tell them how many viewers are watching commercials. But are
USA Today and other newspapers going to list the most-watched spots of the week? That's doubtful. Will comparing last season's ratings of live viewing to the new season, which will include three days of
delayed viewing on DVR, give a clear picture of who's making progress? In other words, our heads will be spinning with spin.
