At a certain point this summer, it may have looked as if your TV had been kidnapped by cruddy reality shows.
Really, did your family set a date to watch "Fast Cars & Superstars" or "Fat March"? Not many people cared what happened "On the Lot," and CBS had to give "Pirate Master" an early burial at sea.
Now that summer's over, the damage can be tallied, and it's considerable: ABC, CBS and NBC all posted double-digit declines among the young-adult viewers they care about most. (Fox, thanks in large part to "So You Think You Can Dance," was flat compared with a year ago.)
As befitting the home of "National Bingo Night," ABC led the losers, shedding 16% of its viewers ages 18 to 49 compared with last summer, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.
So this must mean that chastened network executives have resolved to change course, à la basic cable, and throw their resources into developing crowd-pleasing scripted series for the summer, right? Fewer endeavors like "Shaq's Big Challenge" and more like TNT's cop hit "The Closer"?
Um . . . nope.
"We're probably going to rely more on unscripted than scripted in the summer," Preston Beckman, Fox's scheduling chief, told me. The networks realize it was a bummer of a summer, but no one seems panicked enough to redraw entire battle plans. A few thoughts about tinkering here and there are all they'll admit to.
"The erosion is scary," said Jeff Bader, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment. "Next year, it might be smarter to do fewer shows but maybe market them better."
So it's just a marketing problem? On top of years of declines, these people just lost more than a tenth of their audience over the past three months -- and their solution is to have the guys in marketing noodle over the promos some more?
In fact, broadcasters are moving away from scripted programming the rest of the year too. Only 22 comedies are on the networks' fall schedules, roughly half the number of two seasons ago. There will be 46 one-hour dramas, down from 50 the last couple of seasons.
What will fill the gap this fall? Reality series and game shows, such as NBC's "The Singing Bee," which was one of the few unscripted series that debuted to decent numbers this summer.
This approach may sound crazy, but this is the television business we're talking about. Look a little closer and you begin to understand why network executives are making these kinds of decisions.
