'Friday Night Lights' deal may herald a new era in television

LAST WEEK wasn't a great one for NBC, which saw its fall lineup, including the premiere of a new spin on the old car caper "Knight Rider" and the return of the onetime hit "Heroes," stumble in the ratings.

Whatever happens, though, NBC Entertainment co-Chairman Ben Silverman has already delivered on an important part of what could ultimately prove his legacy at NBC: Hurling a Hail Mary pass to save the low-rated but critically acclaimed fan favorite “Friday Night Lights.” Starting tonight, the once-moribund drama about a football-besotted Texas town will begin its third season with a commercial-free 13-episode run starting this week on DirecTV, in a highly unusual, if not groundbreaking, deal.

Basically, in exchange for getting first dibs on new "FNL" episodes now being shot on location in Texas, DirecTV is subsidizing the series' costs to the extent that it's still a worthwhile proposition for NBC, which plans to run slightly different versions of the same episodes on its broadcast network early next year. The producers have had to trim between 5% and 7% from the show's previous per-episode budget of approximately $2 million. But they promise that hard-core fans -- which "FNL" has in large proportions relative to its puny overall audience, which averaged 6.2 million total viewers last season, according to Nielsen Media Research -- won't notice a difference.

"Nobody took a pay cut," David Nevins, president of Imagine Television, one of the show's producers, told me last week. Compressing the production schedule and taking advantage of some local tax incentives enabled the producers to balance the budget, he added. "It will be very much the same show."

Why does all this matter to those who are not part of the "FNL" faithful? Because TV fans are very likely to see many more of this type of deal in the future. As last week's premiere-week ratings made clear, broadcasters continue to have a hard time hanging on to viewers in the face of competition from cable networks, the Internet, video games, DVDs and other media.

In the meantime, the cable outlets have made great strides in their bid to develop high-quality series -- such as AMC's "Mad Men," which this month won the Emmy for best drama -- because their economic model is much different than broadcasters'. Cable networks produce far less original programming, are working from a much lower baseline in the ratings and, unlike their broadcast cousins, rake in income from subscribers as well as advertisers. Those factors give them a huge advantage over broadcasters in finding programs that target a narrow but discriminating and affluent audience -- precisely the kind of folks who love a show such as "FNL."