Network Scheduling and Sweeps

Alternatively: Where Have All My Shows Gone?

I’ll admit to being a little bit confused last week when I went to watch some of my shows, only to find out that they were pretty much all in reruns. But apparently it became March at some point, and, as is wont to happen, a lot of network shows disappeared off the face of the earth. And since I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar, this caught me by surprise.

I’ll lament the demise of the rerun at some later point; right now I want to talk about scheduling. Network schedules have remained relatively unchanged for a while, and they’re pretty predictable. Shows premiere in late September/early October. There’s a hiatus for most of December and January, but they’re sure to pick up again by February at the latest. New shows through February, then March everything drops off. Sometime in April shows start up again, leading to May, during which there are much-hyped finales.

Three months in there are considered “sweeps” months: November, February, and May. The networks are paying extra attention in those times to how many people are watching their shows, and these are the times when you’ll most often see ratings stunts: special guest stars, bloated episodes, the return to big plot points or the teasing of an audience-favorite coupling. They’re also your “wedding and baby” episodes—basically, the networks really want to make sure you’re watching. It’s when Nielsen is paying a lot of attention.

Which is not to say they don’t care about the other times, but… well, they don’t care about the other times. As much, anyway. A lot of it is simply math. The average season has 22 episodes (maybe 23 or 24, mostly for sitcoms). The three sweeps months each require four new episodes, so that’s 12 already gone. That leaves 10 episodes to be spread over the rest of the months—and you’ve got to have five or six to get from your premiere to November sweeps. So there are maybe 5 to put elsewhere—maybe one for a holiday episode in December, and a few in April to lead up to the May finales. All of this pretty much leaves March out in the cold.

Granted, that was a pretty vague example, and, as always, sometimes networks will mess with the formula. The Event, after all, has just come back from an extended hiatus in the beginning of March. (Though this is perhaps not the best example, as a lot of people believe this is because of the network’s lack of faith in it.) And a lot of times the end of March will pick up, because they don’t want to leave you hanging for too long.

Cable networks have often taken advantage of network hiatuses to air their own shows, so they don’t follow this pattern. And networks will sometimes have their own reasons to air shows off of the typical time blocks, and can really pick and choose where they want to air the episodes not designated for sweeps. It's not an exact science.

But in about a month and a half, I do expect to start seeing some weddings and babies.

Canon

What is Canon?

This used to be a pretty simple question to answer. Whatever showed up on the screen was what happened and what was canon for a TV Show. (Canon: What is deemed law/true about a show and its characters) With the advent of the internet, behind-the-scenes, DVDs, and interviews, things beca

me a bit more complicated.

Shows sometimes run a bit too long to fit into their time slot, and if it’s not a massive hit, the network isn’t going to allow the show the run over. Thus the introduction of TV deleted scenes, now frequently able to be watched via TV DVDs and the internet, leads to the first crimp in the distinction between canon and not. These scenes were written, cut, filmed, and approved by everyone involved with the show. They were only cut because of time. The showrunners wanted to put the scenes in, and without network restrictions, would have. They released the deleted scenes willingly as content. Sometimes it is possible on DVDs to watch an episode with its deleted scenes intact. Should they therefore count as real and true within the universe of the show? Do we assume they happened?

Regardless, though, these scenes weren’t aired. I can think of at least one instance off the top of my head where a deleted scene was directly contradicted by a later aired episode. Looking at both the deleted scene and the later aired episode as canon would give me a bit of a headache.

Then there’s what people say. This tends to fall under two categories: actors and writers/showrunners. Actors will often state things about their characters or what they were thinking when they were performing in a scene. It’s the actor’s job to provide the subtext for a scene, but if they put a voice to their subtext interpretation, does that make it true? Writers/showrunners can give explanations as to why things happened in plot, what they considered was going on, and why they wrote a character doing a particular thing or saying a particular line. Some people will consider this extra information canon, because it was the author’s intent. Others will say that it’s not true if they haven’t put it directly on the screen.

Finally, there’s what some people like to call “fanon”—canon as interpreted by the fans. This often comes about as a result of “fanwanking,” which is when viewers go “Okay, that didn’t make any sense. For what reason could that have possibly happened?” and come up with an answer. Large overarching beliefs about a series tend to be encompassed in fanon, until such point as they become contradicted by what is shown on screen.

(There are also shows with tie-in books, comics, and webisodes, which bring in another level of canon interpretation. Spin-offs also make things a bit tricky, as they generally occur within universe.)

Essentially, canon is a difficult concept to pin down nowadays. Everyone pretty much agrees that what you see and hear on-screen is the ultimate law. Some will posit that whatever those involved with the show say is also true. After all, the writers and the actors know what they’re trying to accomplish. But others will insist that it needs to be shown onscreen to be considered a part of the show’s canon. The interpretation of the creator/showrunner/writer/actor is just another kind of fanon; also legitimate, but still, in the end, an interpretation.

The Guilty Pleasure Show

Almost everyone who watches television has at least one “guilty pleasure show”—something you find engrossing and entertaining, but at the same time you know isn’t actually good. There are plenty of good, quality television shows out there. This blog post is not about them.

This blog post is also not about guilting you about your guilty pleasure shows. Everyone’s entitled to mindless entertainment sometimes. And the guilty pleasure show has evolved into a genre all its own—one that’s been helped and cultivated by the advent of DVRs and the internet.

A guilty pleasure show is generally one you don’t want to admit to watching, so it’s not necessarily one you want to play in the middle of your living room. There’s something embarrassing about it—maybe you’re not its targeted audience, maybe it’s universally panned, maybe it’s a reality show everyone mocks—but at the same time, you don’t want to stop watching it.

There’s nothing wrong with being addicted to a bad show—entertainment doesn’t always need to be high art. Here are a few clues as to whether or not what you’re watching is really a guilty pleasure show.

1) Some element of shame or embarrassment—As mentioned, you don’t necessarily want to tell people this is appointment television for you.

2) Watching habits—Everyone has their own styles of watching television; some people love to do so with lots of people, others can’t stand the chatting company. If you’re the former, chances are there are still one or two shows you don’t want to watch in a crowd. If there's a show you consistently watch on your computer with headphones instead of among friends, it may be a guilty pleasure. (It is also possible your friends have bad taste, of course.)

3) Rationalizations—These are planned ahead of time in case someone finds out you watch the show. “I’m just watching for (actor)!” “I liked it when I was a kid!” “Hey, they’re really hot!” “The way they’re exploring X storyline is really interesting!” “Sidekick B is awesome!” All of those facts may be true, but if you're that quick to come to the defense of something, you've probably been expecting someone to attack you for it.

But hey, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and even if the show is terrible, there’s something that’s catching your eye. So start utilizing your guilty pleasure shows to figure out what you like about them. It’s a lot easier to find a diamond when you’re looking through a pile of crap than a pile of jewels, anyway. If a show is mostly horrid, but it has snappy dialogue, a particular quirky character, or an interesting on-going plot, you'll learn that that's a trait you like in a TV show. Guilty pleasure shows are actually really good ways to refine your tastes, so when the glut of new shows comes on in the new season, you know what you’re looking for and what shows have a good chance of being in your wheelhouse.

Besides, now when someone catches you watching a show you’re embarrassed of, you can always claim it’s research.

The Sophomore Slump

A few shows are great right out of the gate—critical and ratings successes in their first season. Reviewers love them, fans love them, and they are trumpeted throughout the land as The Way to Do Television. Then they hit their second season, and all of a sudden, things take a turn for the worse.

There’s a dip in quality. Fans are up in arms, talking about the Wonder of the previous season and how it’s all gone wrong. Critics shake their heads disappointedly. And everyone starts mentioning the “sophomore slump.”

A lot of shows have gone through it: Lost, Heroes, Glee. And the bigger hits they are, the harder they can fall. Either way, there are several reasons (some legitimate, some less so), that shows can go through the sophomore slump.

1) Time Crunch: Creators can spend a lot of time planning the first season of their TV show—odds are, it won’t get on the air before being decently planned out. However, after it begins airing, all they have for planning time is the hiatus between seasons, which can lead to some very compressed creative decision-making. Veronica Mars wasn’t a ratings hit, but it was a critical darling. But after season one, the creator had a few months to put together a second-season mystery, as compared to the long time he had spent crafting the first season (originally as a novel). As a result, fans and critics complained that the pacing was off for the second season, and the mystery seemed a little less coherent as compared to the show’s original season.

2) New characters: Shows don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, so a lot of times they’ll bring in new blood for the second season. However, viewers are already attached to the original characters, and they’re not always thrilled to find new faces taking up the screen time they believe should be going to their old favorites. Rules for new characters: Make them interesting, integrate them into the plot, don’t overwhelm the viewer with them… and again, please, make them interesting. Heroes is one of the main perpetrators of this (though it is not alone). Heroes is an interesting case, however. It was very much a large ensemble show, and really couldn’t take the glut of new characters the second season threw at the audience—it barely had enough screentime for all of its original regulars. However, Heroes was originally designed to have a new cast of heroes each season; fans got attached to the original cast, the network got attached to the fans, and they tried to combine the two concepts. It didn’t work.

3) New storylines: Many arc-driven shows will complete a main arc in one season. This is logical, especially for the first season, because shows can’t count on being renewed while they’re only in planning stages. Audiences can be fickle. However, this means that they now need to begin a second arc for their second season, and audiences and critics won’t always take well to the new storylines. Lost had some trouble getting viewers to adjust to The Others storyline (which suffered both from being a new storyline and surrounding new characters). It also risks a shift in tone, which can alienate the audience.

4) First impressions/Hype: And then there’s the unavoidable one. Sometimes people can get attached to a show and how it was in the beginning, and any change (good or bad) is wrong. Even if new characters and storylines are pitch-perfect, they are not the same, and therefore viewers disapprove. A show’s own hype can also lead to problematic backlash—even if the show is on par in terms of quality, it’s not as good as it was supposed to be, or not as good as people remember it being. In this day and age, things can go stale very quickly, and aspects of quality television are unfortunately no exception to that rule.

The Sitcom

For roughly the past five years we’ve been warned that the end of the traditional sitcom is nigh. The mid-2000s saw the final episodes of three long-running sitcoms: Friends and Frasier in 2004, and Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005. These were traditional, multi-camera sitcoms with decade-long runs. Will and Grace also ended an eight-year run in 2006. These were sad times for dedicated fans of the shows and for the networks for whom they had been ratings winners, but they probably wouldn’t have provoked whispers of the Demise of the Sitcom without the premiere in 2005 of The Office.

A little background: the word sitcom comes from “situation comedy.” The sitcom is a half-hour show that aims to be funny. Famous examples include I Love Lucy, Cheers, The Wonder Years, Seinfeld, and the shows mentioned in the first paragraph. Traditional sitcoms are three-camera (now multi-camera) sitcoms. This means several cameras are filming each take of the scene at the same time from different angles. In a movie or a television drama, there would only be one camera, and the scene would be shot many times from multiple angles.

One of the reasons the sitcom uses multiple cameras is because they have been traditionally filmed in front of a “live studio audience.” Because of this, sitcoms are also often contained to a few familiar sets, none of which are fully closed. The fourth wall of each set has the cameras and the audience. This is why you’ll always see the set from the same direction each time—the last wall doesn’t exist. Traditional sitcoms also have a laugh track. (These traits describe the average sitcom; obviously, there are some exceptions.)

The Office, an American remake of a British show, broke the mold of the traditional sitcom and became very popular. Had it only done one of those two things, it wouldn't have been a problem. The Office is an example of a single-camera sitcom. It follows the filming structure of a movie or television drama rather than a traditional sitcom. It films without a studio audience and airs without a laugh track. It defied the rules of Hollywood, but it worked.

So naturally, the industry decided it needed to change the rules. Traditional multi-camera sitcoms became less common, and single-camera sitcoms were more likely to be produced. People started saying the End of the Sitcom was near, and new traditional sitcoms that were expected to do well were hailed as potential saviors from this terrible fate. (In 2007, this came from the uniting of Kelsey Grammar and Patricia Heaton in Back to You, but it did not bring the revival the industry hoped it would.)

Still, much as these rumors keep batting about, things in the sitcom world seem to have settled down. Five traditional sitcoms have debuted so far in the 2010-11 season so far on network television. Two single-camera sitcoms will be premiering over the next few months. It looks like, despite the rumors, the single-camera sitcom will not be killing the traditional sitcom anytime soon. Instead, they’ll just have to learn to peacefully coexist, despite all of their differences.

Which, given that that’s the distilled plot of many sitcoms, is rather fitting.

Cliffhangers

TV is one of the few forms of narrative media that can pull off the cliffhanger with any frequency. Movies rarely know about their sequels ahead of time, and books will use cliffhangers for chapters more often than at the end of the book. Television loves cliffhangers, however, because networks love ratings, and cliffhangers make people want to watch the next episode to find out what happens. And that’s what TV is all about—getting you to watch the next episode.

There are three times when cliffhangers normally occur in television series (not including the “act out”—the “something shocking” that happens before a commercial to keep you from changing the channel). Rarely, a series will decide to end every episode with a cliffhanger. Alias did this for much of its first season; each episode ended with Sydney in some dangerous situation. However, “main character in peril” is not highly effective as cliffhangers go; it will rarely leave the audience with the feeling of “what’s going to happen now?", which is the most powerful form of cliffhanger. Instead, the audience focuses on the how; okay, we know the protagonist is going to get out of this, but how are they going to do so? It’s a cliffhanger with less intensity, and can be potentially dangerous if the audience thinks the showrunners are trying to play them. Generally, viewers like to think that the people who write the shows they love are smart, but not that the people who write the shows they love think they’re stupid.

Occasionally, a show will have a two-parter (or multi-parter), and these can also end in cliffhangers. A lot of times these are also less intense cliffhangers, though occasionally characters will be thrown into peril. The majority of the time, something about that episode’s storyline will be revealed at the end of the episode, throwing what we as the audience know into disarray.

The most common time for cliffhangers, however, is the season finale. TV lives off of buzz, and if you can get your viewers talking for the rest of the hiatus about what’s going to happen, you’ve kept them thinking about the show, and they’re more likely to watch it when it returns. This is also one of the few times when a “main character in peril” cliffhanger can work; few major cast overhauls happen midseason, but they can happen at the end of one. Of course, in the age of internet spoilers, this is a lot less worrisome than it used to be—viewers can confirm whether or not the actor is signed on for subsequent seasons with a quick search.

The most famous cliffhanger of all time is “Who Shot JR?” of Dallas. The season ended with someone shooting J.R. Ewing, one of Dallas' main characters. The next season’s premiere is still the third-watched episode of any show in number of viewers (beaten only by a Super Bowl and the M*A*S*H series finale). One of my favorite pieces of TV trivia is that a session of Turkish parliament was apparently suspended so that members could go home and watch the premiere.

And when a TV show has enough pull that it is influencing the workings of foreign governments… well, then you know the cliffhanger is doing its job.

Nostalgia Television

There was an interesting trend in television for most of its history, which I’ll be terming “Nostalgia Television”—television series set in the past. Specifically, two decades in the past. There are several highly successful high-profile shows set roughly twenty years before they actually aired.

The 1970s began the trend with two little shows in 1974: M*A*S*H and Happy Days. Both lasted at least a decade and became television classics; the final episode of M*A*S*H is still the most-watched episode of any television series ever. Both shows, despite airing in the 1970s, took place during the 1950s. During its run, Happy Days moved into the 1960s, but M*A*S*H never did, confined to the 1950s by its setting in the Korean War.

In the 1980s, there was The Wonder Years, in addition to the final seasons of Happy Days, set in the 1960s. The 1990s gave us That 70s Show. All had incredible longevity for television shows, and were major hits with audiences.

Then came the 2000s, and Nostalgia Television stopped working for the networks. There were three shows that premiered early on in the decade, attempting to capitalize on setting things in the 1980s. That 80s Show, Do Over, and That Was Then (the latter being an hour long, as compared to all previous Nostalgia TV Shows, which were half-hour shows) all flopped miserably.

There are a lot of reasons this switchover could have happened. Do Over and That Was ThenThat Was Then  9/11 made the country a lot more about the here-and-now. From 2001-2005, networks rarely debuted sci-fi/fantasy shows, and if they did, they were mostly unsuccessful (with the 2004 exception of Lost).  weren’t just shows about the 80s, they were shows about men being sent back to inhabit the bodies of their younger selves (in the 80s) to not remake the same mistakes. ignored the rule of its predecessors in Nostalgia Television by making an hour-long drama instead of a half-hour comedy.

Or maybe people just really hated the 80s.

American Dreams was the closest early-2000s show to Nostalgia Television, but it didn’t follow the two-decade rule, and it was always a low performer in its time slot. It lasted three seasons, none of which made the top 50 for ratings, and each season declined in ratings and episode orders.

It’s only recently that some form of Nostalgia Television has succeeded, but it’s not on a basic network and it also doesn’t follow the same pattern of a two-decade gap. Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, is a gold mine for AMC (at least as far as Emmy’s go). While it’s not twenty years and it’s not a sitcom, Mad Men does give the glimmer of hope that Nostalgia Television could return to your TV. It’s only 2011; there’s a lot of time left for a show set in the 90s to sweep us all off our feet.