Network TV is Dead

Network TV has been dying for years, but in the 2008-2009 which ends this coming month, it finally croaked.  If some of you don’t care, well, no crap.  Did you check out Better Off Ted the other night?  Yeah, me either.

It didn’t used to be like this — networks rolling out dozens of new shows each year only to cancel them four episodes into their runs.  In 1953 — yep, I’m going way back — an episode of I Love Lucy aired that played on 71% of all television sets in the United States.  Just yesterday I heard that ABC is considering renewing Scrubs for a ninth season.  The percentage of television sets tuning into Scrubs in its eighth season?  3.5.

The comparisons aren’t fair, of course.  There was no cable in 1953, no HBO, no Internet, no DVR, no Hulu or YouTube or Netflix.  TV was a pretty new phenomenon, and everybody in America unified around watching it.  Shows that were way worse than I Love Lucy (which, and I’m not kidding, is really funny even today) did way better than Scrubs is doing now for the simple reason that they existed.

But the fact that comparisons aren’t fair is kind of the point.  TV has gotten so fractured lately that audience-unifying “hit TV shows” have stopped being produced, and those that already exist are slowly dying out.

I know: you have your Grey’s Anatomy and I have my Lost.  We each get together with a group of friends to watch them each week.  And in my case, I go online and read a half-dozen blogs dissecting each episode of Lost the next day.  These shows have vibrant communities.  It’s just that they’re not pulling in “national phenomenon” numbers anymore.  At the beginning of Lost’s second season, it was on top of the world with twenty million viewers per episode.  Now it gets less than half that.

What about American Idol, the number one show on TV for the majority of the past decade?  It’s also sliding in the ratings, slowly but surely: it used to hit over 30 million viewers, and now it’s down to around 23.  CSI?  Used to hit 25, now it’s down to 16.

So which shows take their place in the national zeitgeist?  That’s how it’s always been: new shows emerge to take over for the old ones, crisis averted, fear-mongering proven wrong.  Not this time.  This past season was the nail in the coffin: of twenty-one news shows which debuted in the fall and a dozen or so more midseason, guess how many were considered hits?  One.  The Mentalist, yet another CBS crime show.  Every other show disappointed.

In response, networks have basically given up trying to create new shows: too expensive and too many headaches.  Better to cut costs on the lower-performing shows they already have, especially in this economy.  Take Parks and Recreation, the new Amy Poehler Office clone.  It gets lower ratings than Scrubs, but it’ll return next season because NBC doesn’t have anything better.

NBC in particular has taken a lot of flack for its programming choices lately, but maybe they’re just the first to point out the inevitable.  A few years ago, one executive said that the new plan was to only air reality shows (which are cheap to produce) in the 8 – 9 p.m. spot.  This past year, they decided to give Jay Leno a new talk show from 10 – 11 p.m. every weeknight.  The ratings will be worse than dramas, but it’ll be a lot cheaper.

What we’re arriving at is a network TV landscape that only consists of a handful of original shows that only a handful of people watch.  It’ll be a lot like cable, where shows like Mad Men (2 million viewers per episode) and Burn Notice (4 million viewers per episode) are considered hits.

In fact, in many ways, cable has already usurped it — episodes of The Closer frequently draw bigger crowds than NBC’s current “Must-See TV” Thursday lineup.

What does this mean for you, the average college student who totally didn’t believe me when I said I Love Lucy was funny?  Well, Internet shows will start popping up (like Joss Whedon’s cool Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), but the trick to keeping them around will be figuring out how to make money from them.  And more people will catch shows on DVD, after they’ve been canceled, once they’re sure the show received a proper ending.  For now, don’t expect another show to fill your Lost void when it finishes its run next year.  And if you find a show you do like, good luck finding somebody else who’s even heard of it.

(Image: Insidesocal.com)