‘Chicken Soup’ Called Effort That Failed : Television: Audience fell sharply after ‘Roseanne,’ ABC’s No. 1 show. Network cancels experiment.

ABC Entertainment President Robert Iger said today that the placement of the just-canceled “Chicken Soup” behind “Roseanne” could be considered an experiment that didn’t work.

The network dropped the show Tuesday because the audience fell sharply after “Roseanne,” ABC’s highest-rated show. Viewership fell off as much as 8 million households. ABC has replaced “Chicken Soup” with the return of “Coach.”

“It was a good show. It was well-produced, well-written, and when we put it into that time period we decided to premiere it early and promote it heavily,” Iger said during a meeting with reporters today.

“You could say it was an experiment to put it into that time period. We put it behind our No. 1 show. We expected to lose some audience but we didn’t expect to lose that much. It didn’t work.”

Iger said the network did not seriously consider moving the show because “the audience had taken a look and was turning it off.”

This has been a tough season for new shows on all the networks, and “Chicken Soup” was the highest rated of all new shows.

Asked to comment, Iger said he didn’t want to speculate about shows on CBS or NBC.

“This environment gets tougher and tougher,” he said. “You make a great effort to launch a show and it’s very hard to get the audience to sample a new show. The audience patience is very low. If they don’t like a show the first time they don’t come back. It’s usually futile to try to fix a show once the audience has rejected it.”

Iger said he was surprised by statistics from last season showing that the average rating for the first run of a dramatic series was about the same as the rerun of a comedy show.

“It made me feel good that we launched 16 comedies this season,” he said. “You’re more likely to have a success and less likely to have a failure with a comedy than a drama. It’s much tougher to launch a drama. It requires more involvement from the audience.”

He said ABC’s biggest priority for this season was to fix its weak 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot on Wednesday. Two comedies, “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “Anything But Love,” are doing very well in the ratings. “Doogie Howser,” in fact, is doing much better than he expected.