Reading a Show's Life Line
Many Factors Weigh into Deciding the Fate of a Popular Series
by Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn -- Multichannel News, 10/26/2008 6:00:00 PM MT
Everyone, especially programming executives, loves a hit. But television shows, no matter how strong the ratings, don't last forever — even if some seem to.
FX's signature thriller, The Shield, bows out next month after seven seasons, as does MTV's 10-year-old Total Request Live. The end is also nearing for Sci Fi's five-season Battlestar Galactica and Showtime's six-season The L Word, which completes its run with eight episodes in 2009.
Meanwhile, HBO's Entourage, USA Network's Monk, TLC's Trading Spaces, National Geographic Channel's The Dog Whisperer and A&E Network's Dog the Bounty Hunter are all getting a little long in the tooth — though, at press time, most were expected to return for another season.
Deciding how long to keep a popular show on the air, or when to pull the plug, is a delicate balance that must serve two masters: art and commerce.
“It's something that we deal with and struggle with all the time,” said USA president Bonnie Hammer, whose service marks the 100th episode of Monk, now in its seventh season, and will telecast the 800th episode of its World Wrestling Entertainment Monday Night Raw franchise next year.
“You have to evaluate each show for its own bench strength at the moment and see, is it still healthy and strong?” Hammer said. “Creatively, can the writers still write for the show or is it getting tired? Does it still it fit your brand: Have you tweaked your brand, where have you gone with your brand, do you even have a brand and how does it fit into a whole?”
On the other side of the equation: “You have to have shows that you are already pumping on your air, and others that are on the bench waiting to be launched to fill in the hole for when you and the writers and the talent decide it should be the last year,” said Hammer.
In recent years, some of the most successful and long-running cable franchises have been unscripted pop-culture shows such as Bravo's Top Chef and The Real Housewives of Orange County (which has been spun off into a number of incarnations), as well as informational series such as the celebrity docuseries The E! True Hollywood Story, which will reach its 500th episode in 2009.
“It's different for us versus a scripted show, because each week it's almost an entirely new subject,” said Comcast Entertainment executive vice president of research and strategic planning Cyndi McClellan. “If you look at a True Hollywood Story from 10 years ago, when it first started, to today, the tools and the tactics they use are very different and it really has to do with the editing style, the people we're approaching to help tell that story. Once we have a good subject, it's just a matter of telling that story.”
THE JUGGLING ACT
The good thing is that when you're successful with shows, “you kind of know when the time is right,” said Showtime Networks chairman and CEO Matt Blank, who considers the end of the controversial lesbian drama The L Word “a bittersweet decision.”
In this particular case, however, show creator Ilene Chaiken was allowed to let her series run its course. “I didn't know until the show was picked up for a sixth season that it would be its final season,” said Chaiken. “Of course, I was delighted because I preferred having been told, 'Let's do a final season,' which I thought was both respectful and smart.”
Then there are those times when business decisions trump art, as was the case for creator Linda Schuyler's Instant Star, which ran for four seasons on The N. (It also aired on Canadian broadcaster CTV.)
“This is where a show's longevity is out of the hands of the producer and in the hands of the [programmers],” Schuyler said. “If it was up to us, we would have done a fifth season, but we knew it would be the fifth and last. If I'd known before we went in and wrote the last episode that we wouldn't have been doing a fifth season, we would have approached our storytelling a little differently.”
Though not speaking specifically about Instant Star, The N senior vice president and general manager Sarah Tomassi Lindman insisted: “It can be pretty clear in any franchise when the stories are getting repetitive, and it feels like there isn't any new ground to cover. Not every show has the foundation on which to build nine or 10 seasons.”
Schuyler, nonetheless, knows the joys of a long run. Her high-school drama Degrassi: The Next Generation, now in its eighth season on The N, is the latest installment in a franchise which began in 1980 with The Kids of Degrassi Street.
“Working on a youth show works in our favor,” Schuyler said. “Basically, we use the school as the center point of our show and it's an environment that allows for people to evolve, grow, change, graduate and new ones to come in. The venue is just conducive to allowing new waves of cast to come through all the time.”
Schuyler admits she didn't create the show thinking it would run nearly 30 years, “but Degrassi's all about first-time experiences,” she said, “and one of the things that I do is I make sure we keep a very young writing team [that] is constantly changing. What with young writers that keep changing along with the cast, those are two crucial ingredients to our longevity.”
ww“It would take a lot of the pressure off the challenge of launching and developing new shows,” said FX president John Landgraf.
Serialized dramas such as FX's The Shield, Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me or Damages; AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad; or The Sopranos on HBO just don't lend themselves to infinite runs, explained Landgraf. Nip/Tuck is already scheduled to be clipped at its 100th episode, and while Landgraf won't reveal how many episodes remain for Rescue Me, he has been having ongoing conversations with executive producers Denis Leary and Peter Tolan about when the series will inevitably end.
“It's quite different with serialized shows that have what I'd call an internal dramatic structure than procedurals,” said Landgraf. “These are not shows about catching the bad guy or curing the disease. That's the reason Law & Order can go 20 years. You can replace actors, characters can come and go, and it's still about investigating crimes and prosecuting crimes.”
Added Landgraf: “The Shield would become The Dukes of Hazzard if Vic Mackey were going for 15 years escaping every effort to bring him to justice. Undoubtedly, there are some fans of the show that wish it were not ending — I'm a fan of the show, and wish it were not ending. But I think it needs to end.”
MAKING THE CALL
The Shield's creator and executive producer, Shawn Ryan, agreed. “John and I were both on the same page in terms of making sure that the show ended on top creatively and neither of us wanted the show to stick around longer than it warranted,” he said.
“There is a natural life span,” said Monk creator and executive producer Andy Breckman. “People just get burned out naturally, and we don't want to push ourselves to do seasons we're not 100% proud of.
“We feel we have X number of stories we can tell with these characters, and we're getting close to that X. Season eight feels right. There have been discussions and I think everyone is on the same page.”
While Breckman admits writing the series is easier now because he knows the characters, the audience and what works for both, he fears going too long could make the show redundant and disappointing to fans whose viewership has helped the show deliver more than 3 million viewers, including 2 million-plus in adults 25-54, in every season since its premiere in 2002.
“Our audience is very loyal and I'd love to end things on our terms and that, on paper, is at least our plan,” Breckman said, adding, “there are different economic pressures on long running cable shows than there are on the network. We just cannot generate as much revenue as a hit show on the network.”
Broadcasters, added Chaiken “want to have a show that will run as long as Law & Order or any other show you might name in that paradigm, but I think it is becoming harder and harder in the new world of television to create a show that has that kind of sustainability.”
THE SPIN FACTOR
Creating a spinoff of a series can certainly help bolster a franchise's longevity. For its part, Showtime has tapped Chaiken for an untitled L Word spinoff, in which the character of Alice Pieszecki (played by actress Leisha Hailey) moves on.
“I was especially interested because the way the challenge came to me was, 'Let's do a very different show,' and that's what makes me think it might actually work,” Chaiken said. “Often an audience, particularly fans of a show, will wind up being disappointed that the new show isn't the old show. But when you're doing something completely different, you can side-step some of those expectations.”
Another key is having a really strong creative vision, said Tomassi Lindman. “And having strong writers and strong producers, the people who are going to bring those great ideas and fresh storylines that keep a show going season after season,” she added.
Such a strong vision led Sci Fi to give the green light to executive producer Ronald Moore's Caprica, the prequel to Battlestar Galactica; and to co-executive producers Brad Rice and Robert Cooper's Stargate: Universe, the third series in the long-running Stargate franchise.
“This was a creative call to move Stargate Atlantis into [made-for-television] movies and then to launch Stargate: Universe,” said Sci Fi president Dave Howe. “Stargate SG-1 went 10 years; Stargate Atlantis is now in its fifth season; and the producers looked at the stories and how it played out and how many more iterations of that story felt right and we totally agreed with them.
“Stargate Atlantis had been great, but it was now time to think about the next chapter.”
The holy grail in terms of media and entertainment these days is franchise-building, according to Howe.
“We're focused on it. Hollywood theatrical movies are focused on it, the level of investment that is required to develop and launch a series is, from a marketing perspective, huge,” he said. “The difficulty in terms of breaking out and attracting and sustaining that audience, if you can create something that is franchise-able, then the business model is much more powerful and much more long-term, and so much more consistent and viable, and that's the business we're all in.”
THINKING BIG
It explains why, in recent months, we've seen a number of TV shows finding their way to the big screen — two of them from cable, HBO's Sex and the City and Disney Channel's High School Musical.
“Even with a successful TV franchise,” said The N's Tomassi Lindman, “creating a great and satisfying television experience is very different from creating a great and satisfying movie experience, and that's why the people who make movies aren't generally making television. There really are separate skill sets.”
Showtime's Blank conceded: “If we thought we could be commercially successful with a movie spin-off, we would be the first ones to go to CBS Films with that,” he said. “The movie business isn't easy, and if we had a piece of product that we thought made sense to develop into a feature, I think we'd give that a shot. It's not a natural next step for us.”
For many broadcast networks, the longer a series runs, the more they can bolster their revenue streams by syndicating their shows nationally or to cable. But cable, even with its most successful shows, can end a run with fewer than 80 episodes, and tends to rerun its own originals multiple times a night, throughout the week and in marathon blocks runs to better amortize the dollars per run on their own channels. That doesn't make syndication less attractive — just not as necessary to the bottom line.
“We always hope a show is good enough for our distribution group to want to put it out in syndication, both because it's good business for the company and it shows the success for what you've created,” said USA's Hammer. “So it's a fine line of when is the best time for both its life in your brand and for revenue for the company as a whole.”
For premium cable, syndication sales can be very dependent “on the show's subject matter,” said Blank. “We do have shows that some years out could be valuable there.
“L Word will have 71 episodes when it goes off the air. The Tudors will go into a third season, and who knows how long that show will run. But I would think that with only a couple of seasons worth of shows, that show could have a successful basic-cable run at some point. We're not there yet, but I think the rules are changing because of changes in the marketplace.” (Last week, Showtime announced that it had also renewed its drama series Dexter for fourth and fifth seasons; and its show Brotherhood begins season three on Nov. 2.)
Beyond syndication, or taking a show to the big screen, programmers also see the Internet as a great vehicle for extending the life of a franchise beyond television.
“The extension of shows online is where you can influence directly original content which will go on a whole other electronic medium, which the fans love,” said USA's Hammer. “If it keeps on going, maybe that's a real clue to throwing it up on the big screen, but there's so many ways to keep content alive, and even monetizable, that doesn't just live on our television screen.”
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