What are the experts' views ...
Question: What are the experts' views on the nonstop season? To my knowledge,
24 is the only show to do this (other than WWE), and I love it. It is much easier to take the extended hiatus of Jack Bauer and crew after an edge-of-your-seat, thrill-a-week bombardment for 24 weeks straight that actually gives closure (mostly) to the season. I wish every show on TV would do this. Show us all the new stuff at once, leave us happy, then do it all again with something else. Is it possible for this to happen at all? Is this a smart route for TV to take, or can this only work for things like
24?
Answer: I put this question here primarily as an excuse to be able to officially go
Oh, my god! now that the first hours of
24 have finally been shown. If you watched (and if you're reading this column, I'm assuming you did; and if you didn't,
stop reading this immediately), then you can only imagine how difficult it has been to keep quiet about the explosive events of the first 15 or so minutes of the new season. David Palmer assassinated! Michelle blown up in her car! Tony critically injured by a secondary blast! Chloe running for her life and calling Jack back into action, risking his neck to save hers, while he's being set up for Palmer's assassination. And so forth. I can't remember a more breathless start to any season of any show. And how about
Jean Smart as the first lady, at first coming off as a whack job, but on closer inspection looking like a canny player in her own right? And someone I'd much rather have running the country than her mealymouthed hubby.
OK, now that I've gushed, here's the deal on a straight-through season. It works beautifully for 24, and for Fox with this particular show, and I liked it when ABC tried it with Alias last year, as well. But these are exceptions, and most networks aren't likely to try this strategy with most shows. The other way to go is to take a show off the air for a period of time, like WB is doing right now with Everwood, to spare the show a ratings decline with repeats by having it share the time period with a limited-run mid-season series, then returning the original show to that time period for the remainder of the season. In each of these cases, the idea is to avoid the pitfalls of viewer discontent and defection during a rerun cycle, which still is an unavoidable part of the network TV business more often than not. Keeping 24 off the air for half the year makes it more of an event (same goes for American Idol), but other shows that also might benefit from this kind of scheduling (like Lost, for instance) are too popular and too integral to the network's identity and bottom line to be kept off the air for so long.
It's possible we'll see more of this as the networks start scheduling more and more like the cable channels, which order fewer episodes of most of their series and thus tend to split the time (think of FX splitting Tuesday nights between seasons of The Shield and Nip/Tuck for much of the year). But we're probably still a few years away for this to become common practice on the Big Four, such as they are.
