END OF ‘AMERIKA’ DREAM: DISAPPOINTMENT AND DRAMA : Unsatisfactory Ratings Don’t Bode Well for Long Projects

If criticism of “Amerika” from the left, the right, the Soviet Union, the United Nations and TV reviewers could be exchanged for ratings, ABC might have had a mega-winner of a miniseries.

However, despite all the fuss and attendant publicity over the nearly 15-hour program, it won’t even average the minimum 35% share of audience that ABC expected when “Amerika” began its seven-night run Feb. 15. Through Friday it was averaging a 29% share.

The disappointing ratings are likely to make it even tougher for writers and producers to persuade the cost-conscious networks to undertake such drawn-out miniseries in the future. Officials at ABC, CBS and NBC say they are primarily looking for projects of not more than six or eight hours, rather than the 10-plus hours that have marked such miniseries hits as “Roots,” “Shogun,” “Rich Man, Poor Man,” “The Thorn Birds” and “Winds of War.”

CBS Entertainment President Bud Grant declined to call the long miniseries dead, but “I would say it’s an endangered species because of the high risk. Everything in television is risk, and that (the long-form show) is extraordinarily high risk.”

ABC has a miniseries of record-breaking length in the works for next season--the 30-hour “War and Remembrance,” Herman Wouk’s sequel to “Winds of War.” But ABC-TV President John B. Sias already has said that, because of high costs and flat advertising revenues in today’s television marketplace, it is “highly unlikely” that future ABC miniseries will exceed six hours.

Although national ratings for Sunday’s closing chapter of “Amerika” won’t be available until today, the 13-city “overnight” ratings showed that the occasionally explosive finale got an average 32% audience share.

Those ratings, made available Monday, were sufficient for “Amerika” to win its two-hour period in those cities, including Los Angeles. However, national Nielsen returns for earlier installments of “Amerika” were running about two points lower than the overnight returns.

A Monday-morning post-mortem, offered by an advertising executive who asked not to be identified, was that the show seemed padded with lingering gazes by the major characters, and in general was “boring, boring, boring.”

There was no immediate comment on the ratings from ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard, who was reported en route to Minneapolis to participate Monday night in an ABC News’ “Viewpoint” panel on “Amerika.”

At NBC, meanwhile, Susan Baerwald, vice president for miniseries, said she wouldn’t rule out altogether the possibility of undertaking a maxi-length miniseries. “I think the only rules you can make are to find a good story and suit the length of it to what the story is telling,” she said.

But she also suggested that it wasn’t likely: “I have rarely read a piece of material that I think couldn’t be done in eight hours or less.”

Producer Stan Margulies, whose credits include the 12-hour “Roots” and the 10-hour “Thorn Birds,” television’s two highest-rated miniseries, gave a qualified “yes” to the question of whether the era of the major-length miniseries is over.

“I think so, except there will always be the wonderful exception,” said Margulies, whose “Roots,” one of the earliest miniseries, averaged an incredible 66% share of audience when ABC broadcast it in January, 1977.

Like others interviewed by phone last week, he said that he doesn’t think the miniseries is dead as a TV form--which is a good thing, he added, since he is currently developing five of them.

After the initial post-”Roots” burst of network enthusiasm for minis, the form fell on hard times after a spate of ratings duds, “and everybody said, ‘Well, miniseries have had it,’ ” Margulies recalled. “But ‘Shogun’ (a 1980 NBC hit) revived it.”

But costs, not ratings, are the primary reason the network emphasis henceforth is likely to be on what he calls “the shortened miniseries,” said Margulies, whose other miniseries include “Mystic Warrior,” “Moviola” and this season’s “Out on a Limb.”

“Unfortunately, for those of us who love them, miniseries have never really earned their way,” he said. “Reruns (of the shows) have not done well. . . . The initial look is terrific and that’s it.”

Now, he said, the gap between what a show costs and the license fee that networks will pay to air it twice “continues to widen, and I think that’s the primary reason for (network) people saying, ‘Hey, four or five hours is terrific and beyond that we’re getting into big bucks.’ ”

NBC’s Baerwald has six miniseries lined up for next season. She said that while there are no hard-and-fast rules, doing even an eight-hour mini nowadays “is very, very difficult, and beyond that, almost impossible, because of the financial implications . . .”

Baerwald, whose network suffered a mini-misfire last fall with its “Rage of Angels” sequel (a 25% share of audience), was asked what she would have done had director-writer Donald Wrye pitched his downbeat “Amerika” to NBC.

“I would have said it’s an intriguing original idea,” she said. “However, I certainly would have said I don’t see more than six hours (for the show). That an audience doesn’t come back on subsequent nights to be depressed.”

CBS’ Grant was asked if he thought six hours probably is the new maximum for miniseries.

Given a choice between that and a 12-hour project, he replied, “I think I’d rather have a six-hour miniseries. I think that sufficiently breaks up what I call the predictability of network television.”

On Sunday, his network will enter its miniseries contender in the last week of the current ratings “sweeps” race--a four-night, eight-hour dramatization of Judith Krantz’ “I’ll Take Manhattan.”

As befits a programmer of his position, Grant thinks his miniseries will do well. However, he added jokingly, “I’m glad it’s not 14 hours, I’ll tell you that.”