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ABC-Ya Later
by Sophia Banay
May 14 2008
May 14 2008
Stuck in second place with its most promising shows still in development, ABC's fall prospects are much like Jimmy Kimmel—no laughing matter.
With a dearth of new shows to announce—just two new ones airing this fall—the focus at the ABC Upfront Tuesday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall was on the numbers.
Oh, and slinging mud at the competition, at ABC's own shows, and at the American viewing public.
After an introduction from Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, Jimmy Kimmel, host of the network's late-night talk show, took the stage. He started by admonishing the sitting audience to "Please, sit," in a mocking reference to Jimmy Fallon's identical joke at the press conference yesterday where NBC anointed him the next host of their late-night show.
Kimmel then took several self-conscious digs at this year's Upfront’s general lack of stars, booze, and food—in light of diminishing ratings and weak slates of new shows, the networks have cut back on their annual presentations this year.
"ABC might be the worst date ever," Kimmel told the assembled advertising executives. "We expect you to put out, and we're not even going to buy you a drink."
But he soon moved from self-deprecation to attack mode, saying that things at ABC were better than at NBC, where the network had relabeled it's presentation the "Infronts" this year because they were "just in front of the CW"—a reference to NBC's fourth-place standing among the major broadcast networks. On Thursday, he added to raucous laughter, the Fox network would be hosting the "reach arounds."
As for the move of Scrubs, NBC's successful hospital-satire show, to ABC, Kimmel admonished that it was a bad idea to steal from networks in last place.
In a final display of cynicism, he proclaimed that the future for ABC looked bright. "TV sets are bigger than ever, kids are fatter then ever, and gas has never been more expensive. We have the whole country sitting on a couch, and if we can’t sell them stuff, we should all be very ashamed of ourselves."
Kimmel was followed by Mike Shaw, ABC's president of sales and marketing, who trotted out several PowerPoint slides for the afternoon's low point, a dry lecture on ABC's "advertising-value index," which allows advertisers to pick the audience metrics most important to them—education, household income—and weigh them according to priority.
Finally, Stephen McPherson, president of ABC entertainment, took the stage to review the upcoming fall schedule, built around returning shows like Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives—both of which are several seasons old and showing signs of age and viewer falloff since the strike.
Only two new shows—Opportunity Knocks, in which host Ashton Kutcher picks an American family and literally builds a family-style game show set in their neighborhood for them to compete in, and Life on Mars, a 1970s-style police drama complete with a time-travel hook—will debut in the fall, showing the extent to which ABC was left flat-footed by the writers' strike.
In a positive sign, five one-season shows, including Eli Stone, Dirty Sexy Money, and Private Practice, a Grey's spinoff, will return.
For ABC, which ranks a respectable second in the desirable-to-advertisers 18 to 49 age range, the challenge is to continue to deliver strong programming to audiences who remain in thrall to Fox’s Super Bowl event and juggernaut American Idol (which has had its own ratings decline this spring).
While second place sounds fine, the percentage of households tuning in to ABC on an average night of the week during prime-time programming is just 2.8 percent—the same as CBS. ABC squeaks by with 40,000 more viewers. Fox’s household rating is 4 percent.
And ABC's two fall shows are certainly not poised to become enormous Idol-style, or even Housewives-style, hits. The network does have a slate of almost 20 shows in development, but only felt confident enough to tease two of them at the Upfronts: Fourplay, a comedy about two male best friends and their lives, which drew weak laughter; and In The Motherhood, a series which began life online and stars Jenny McCarthy, Leah Remini, and Chelsea Handler as mothers dealing with the indignities of being moms. That one got a warmer reception.
An animated comedy from the producers of King of the Hill, called The Goode Family, will debut mid-season.
But the show that received by far the longest tease was for a reality competition that will air this summer, called Wipeout. Contestants have to navigate a seemingly impossible obstacle course for a prize of $50,000. The preview given to advertisers featured lingering close-ups of contestants jiggling in Spandex, tripping across a narrow platform next to a wall from which boxing gloves jab, knocking them into a muddy lake, and flailing—and falling—across four enormous rubber contraptions called "The Big Balls."
The Upfront closed with a sneak peak of the next season of Lost, which had audiences streaming for the doors, presumably to avoid spoilers. Or maybe they'd just had enough of ABC's watered-down Upfront.
Oh, and slinging mud at the competition, at ABC's own shows, and at the American viewing public.
After an introduction from Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, Jimmy Kimmel, host of the network's late-night talk show, took the stage. He started by admonishing the sitting audience to "Please, sit," in a mocking reference to Jimmy Fallon's identical joke at the press conference yesterday where NBC anointed him the next host of their late-night show.
Kimmel then took several self-conscious digs at this year's Upfront’s general lack of stars, booze, and food—in light of diminishing ratings and weak slates of new shows, the networks have cut back on their annual presentations this year.
"ABC might be the worst date ever," Kimmel told the assembled advertising executives. "We expect you to put out, and we're not even going to buy you a drink."
But he soon moved from self-deprecation to attack mode, saying that things at ABC were better than at NBC, where the network had relabeled it's presentation the "Infronts" this year because they were "just in front of the CW"—a reference to NBC's fourth-place standing among the major broadcast networks. On Thursday, he added to raucous laughter, the Fox network would be hosting the "reach arounds."
As for the move of Scrubs, NBC's successful hospital-satire show, to ABC, Kimmel admonished that it was a bad idea to steal from networks in last place.
In a final display of cynicism, he proclaimed that the future for ABC looked bright. "TV sets are bigger than ever, kids are fatter then ever, and gas has never been more expensive. We have the whole country sitting on a couch, and if we can’t sell them stuff, we should all be very ashamed of ourselves."
Kimmel was followed by Mike Shaw, ABC's president of sales and marketing, who trotted out several PowerPoint slides for the afternoon's low point, a dry lecture on ABC's "advertising-value index," which allows advertisers to pick the audience metrics most important to them—education, household income—and weigh them according to priority.
Finally, Stephen McPherson, president of ABC entertainment, took the stage to review the upcoming fall schedule, built around returning shows like Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives—both of which are several seasons old and showing signs of age and viewer falloff since the strike.
Only two new shows—Opportunity Knocks, in which host Ashton Kutcher picks an American family and literally builds a family-style game show set in their neighborhood for them to compete in, and Life on Mars, a 1970s-style police drama complete with a time-travel hook—will debut in the fall, showing the extent to which ABC was left flat-footed by the writers' strike.
In a positive sign, five one-season shows, including Eli Stone, Dirty Sexy Money, and Private Practice, a Grey's spinoff, will return.
For ABC, which ranks a respectable second in the desirable-to-advertisers 18 to 49 age range, the challenge is to continue to deliver strong programming to audiences who remain in thrall to Fox’s Super Bowl event and juggernaut American Idol (which has had its own ratings decline this spring).
While second place sounds fine, the percentage of households tuning in to ABC on an average night of the week during prime-time programming is just 2.8 percent—the same as CBS. ABC squeaks by with 40,000 more viewers. Fox’s household rating is 4 percent.
And ABC's two fall shows are certainly not poised to become enormous Idol-style, or even Housewives-style, hits. The network does have a slate of almost 20 shows in development, but only felt confident enough to tease two of them at the Upfronts: Fourplay, a comedy about two male best friends and their lives, which drew weak laughter; and In The Motherhood, a series which began life online and stars Jenny McCarthy, Leah Remini, and Chelsea Handler as mothers dealing with the indignities of being moms. That one got a warmer reception.
An animated comedy from the producers of King of the Hill, called The Goode Family, will debut mid-season.
But the show that received by far the longest tease was for a reality competition that will air this summer, called Wipeout. Contestants have to navigate a seemingly impossible obstacle course for a prize of $50,000. The preview given to advertisers featured lingering close-ups of contestants jiggling in Spandex, tripping across a narrow platform next to a wall from which boxing gloves jab, knocking them into a muddy lake, and flailing—and falling—across four enormous rubber contraptions called "The Big Balls."
The Upfront closed with a sneak peak of the next season of Lost, which had audiences streaming for the doors, presumably to avoid spoilers. Or maybe they'd just had enough of ABC's watered-down Upfront.
