‘COSBY’ IN SYNDICATION-- ‘LET THE GAMES BEGIN’

Television history is about to be made.

At 4 p.m., EST, today, the New York accounting firm of Price Waterhouse will deliver to Viacom Enterprises sealed bids that will determine which Los Angeles station gets to broadcast “The Cosby Show” every weekday starting in the fall of 1988.

With New York station WOR-TV having just spent a reported record-smashing $364,000 per episode for these so-called syndication rights, the Los Angeles bidding is expected to break records locally, if not nationally.

Nationwide, Bill Cosby, the Carsey-Werner Co. (executive producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner) and Viacom, the series’ syndicator, could wind up sharing as much as half a billion dollars in syndication and advertising revenues.

Station management here is necessarily tight-lipped, but smart money says that independents KHJ Channel 9, KCOP Channel 13 and KTTV Channel 11 will be duking it out for “Cosby” rights.

Only an independent station, the reasoning goes, could afford to pay the minimum bid of $150,000 per week that Viacom is asking. That’s because the show will have to run between 6 and 8 p.m. to draw a large enough audience to recoup its expense--if that’s even possible--and network affiliates KNBC, KCBS and KABC run news or original programming in that time period. Ad rates will have to double or triple in some markets to offset “Cosby’s” expense.

KTLA Channel 5, meanwhile, might not want to pay “Cosby’s” high price tag, since it’s already No. 1 in the market, industry observers say.

But for a hungry second- or third-place station looking to improve its standing, “Cosby” has “the largest coattails in history,” said Joseph Zaleski, president of domestic syndication for Viacom. That refers to “Cosby’s” potential to yank up the ratings of shows that precede and follow it, and with them the advertising rates charged in those time periods.

They would have to. The minimum bid alone handily tops the previous L.A. sitcom record, set by “Webster” at $120,000 per episode. For an accurate comparison, “Cosby’s” per-week minimum translates to about $218,000 per episode. (There are fewers episodes--125--than there are weeks in the deal.) The actual winning bid will have to be higher still.

“I can say this, it’s a rough deal financially,” said Steve Bell, vice president and general manager of KTLA. “They’re asking more money than anyone has ever asked and it’s a very critical decision for a station.

“We’re not talking about making money here--we’re talking about breaking even at best or more likely losing money.”

Stations must also accept Viacom’s total control over which episodes air when. Viacom will deliver the episode of its choice each weekday via satellite. It will not follow the standard syndication practice of selling stations a bundle of tapes for use at their discretion--a practice that allowed different episodes of “MASH,” at its peak, to be seen several times a day.

“We said we gotta do something different for ‘Cosby,’ ” said Zaleski, who has been working up the Cosby marketing scheme almost since the show debuted.

The terms laid out by Viacom demonstrate in the extreme just how lucrative television production can be when a show becomes a hit.

Sitcoms such as “Webster,” “Family Ties,” “Cheers” and “Silver Spoons,” once they edged past the 100-episode mark, all sold in the $100,000 to $120,000 per-episode range at L.A. stations, bringing in $1.5 to $1.7 million per episode nationwide.

“Magnum, P.I.” was in the high end of that range, a peak for hourlong series.

Multiply that times at least 110 episodes after five seasons--more if the series continues-- and you have in the neighborhood of $200 million to major studios like Paramount (“Cheers,” “Family Ties”) or Universal (“Magnum”) or independents like Embassy TV (“Silver Spoons”).

Those figures are expected to look like loose change compared to the “Cosby” take.

In part, that’s because stations are buying “Cosby” by the week, not by the episode, so in effect, they’ll be paying for most episodes more than once. The total in fees from participating stations in the 210 U.S. television markets is projected--very conservatively--at $300 million to $350 million for the first 182 weeks of syndication, informed sources say.

Add to that an estimated $750,000 per week in ad revenue for the minute per day of commercial time that Viacom will keep for itself, and you have another $140 million. That’s a total of nearly $500 million.

But as the WOR bid demonstrates, Viacom is in a position to call the shots. The company likes to point out that “Cosby” won its time period with its first airing and has never lost since--for 110 straight weeks, even in summer reruns on NBC.

What’s more, viewership of “Cosby” has steadily increased in its time slot on NBC. This season, an average 56% of all households watching TV on Thursdays at 8 p.m. tune to “Cosby,” up from 49% last year and 38% in 1984-85.

Viacom thus might be forgiven a little smugness--as on the 8-minute presentation tape shown to L.A. broadcasters last week. The tape ends with a clip of Cosby on an episode of his series saying, “Let the games begin.”

These games, however, significantly change the rules of syndication.

Viacom is approaching syndication as if “Cosby” were a brand-new, so-called “first-run” show. Viewers nationwide will see the same episode of “Cosby” on any given day--and only once a day per station.

For Viacom, the “first-run” approach means that it can tack on national advertising to each episode. A high-tech process will compress the length of each episode--don’t ask us how--from its 24 1/2-minute network running time to 22 minutes. Local stations will get 5 1/2 minutes of saleable time per episode, while Viacom will retain one minute.

Serendipity comes into play, too, in the high-stakes TV game. Carsey and Werner were two former ABC execs hoping for a hit when Viacom Enterprises--which hadn’t syndicated a network series since “All in the Family”--signed them to a deal four years ago.

According to that deal, Viacom promised to pay the weekly deficit on Carsey-Werner shows--the shortfall between what a network pays and what a series actually costs to make--in exchange for syndication rights.

When Viacom was losing money on Carsey-Werner’s failed “Oh, Madeline!” series and funding some dead-end pilots, no one could know that Bill Cosby would emerge a short time later and become the undisputed king of prime-time TV.

That same kind of capriciousness, some naysayers observe, could yet bring a surprise ending to the Cosby saga.

“MASH” was at first underpriced in syndication but went on to be the highest-rated former network series in syndication, bringing in several hundred million dollars. But such sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “Mary Tyler Moore” and “The Bob Newhart Show”--all big winners that kept CBS on top much as “Cosby” now is helping to do for NBC--did not get the ratings in syndication that their network performance would have indicated.

On the other hand, the “Cosby” plan is designed in part to keep it fresh, to avoid the “ratings decay” that affected “MASH” once it could be seen many times a day. Too, since Viacom spotted “Cosby” as a winner “after only one episode,” according to Zaleski, it didn’t agree to let NBC have a daytime run of the series, which would have provided additional pre-syndication exposure.

“I think it’s a little too early to make any predictions,” said Robert Jacquemin, senior vice president of the Walt Disney Co.’s syndication arm and the executive who masterminded the “Cheers” and “Family Ties” deals, among others, while at Paramount. “It’s the 500-pound gorilla story--they can market it any way they want. Whether or not it can become the wave of the future is too soon to tell.”