Fox Keeps Emmy Show for Next Three Years for $9.5 Million : Television: The ‘fourth network’s’ whopping increase over its previous payment reflects an increasing challenge to the Big Three.

“Fantastic” was the way the negotiator for rights to the Emmy Awards described the bid by Fox TV.

The three-year offer for the Emmy show by the young network, totaling $9.5 million, was a whopping increase over its previous payment of about $3.5 million for the TV rights to the awards from 1987 to 1989.

The bid over Fox’s larger competitors, ABC, CBS and NBC, passed its final hurdle Wednesday night at a special meeting of the board of governors of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which presents the Emmy Awards.

Fox’s offer had narrowly won approval by a 20-16 margin at an academy meeting in Burbank on Feb. 14. Dissidents who felt other options were worth considering--including more exposure for the Emmys on a larger network--pressed for the special meeting.

The result: It’s Fox’s Emmys all the way.

“Some governors felt the vote on Feb. 14 was so close, did not include nearly 20 governors who were absent and might not have reflected the board of governors’ true desires,” said a leader of the dissident faction. “After a very open discussion, it became obvious to those of us who desired the meeting that the majority of the board favored the Fox bid. No vote was needed.”

“We had one fantastic bid, and there was no offer from the other three” networks, Mel Blumenthal, head of the academy’s negotiating committee and senior executive vice president of MTM Enterprises, said in an interview before the meeting.

Fox’s right of first refusal in the Emmy bidding apparently was a major factor in freezing out the Big Three networks.

Two Fox stations, KTTV Channel 11 here and WNYW-TV in New York, will also televise, for the first time, an Emmy show that honors winners in creative and technical crafts. The nationally televised awards ceremonies for top performances and programs usually follows within a week and traditionally opens the new TV season in September.

Behind Wednesday’s final outcome of the Fox bid was maneuvering that reflected the increasing challenge of the “fourth network” to long-established CBS, NBC and ABC.

The Big Three networks could point correctly to the fact that the Emmys, honoring TV’s top achievements, were getting less exposure on Fox because of its smaller station lineup.

In 1989, Fox drew its biggest audience for the Emmys, some 17 million viewers. In 1986, the last year before Fox began broadcasting the awards, NBC attracted about 60 million viewers for the show.

But Fox, with such hits as “The Simpsons,” “Married . . . With Children” and “America’s Most Wanted”--all on Sunday, the night the Emmys are presented--is building a stronger case for itself and the fact that it seems here to stay, although it may never match past audience figures for the awards show because of the increasing fragmentation of TV.

Just this week, “Married . . . With Children” ranked 24th among all prime-time programs in the national TV ratings; “The Simpsons”--a new animated sensation--was 26th, and “America’s Most Wanted” was 46th, a solid showing for Fox, which debuted in 1986.

ABC, CBS and NBC had been stunned three years ago when upstart Fox, in one of its first significant moves, outbid them for the Emmys as virtually a new-born network. The sale of TV rights to the Emmy Awards is the academy’s single greatest source of income, and Fox’s bid for 1987-89 was considerably higher than what the Big Three had been paying for the show. In 1986, NBC got the Emmys for $750,000.

Fox also negotiated a move that came to be a key problem for the other networks this year--the right of first refusal in any new agreement.

“Yes, we were interested in carrying the show,” said a spokeswoman for NBC, “but we weren’t in a position to bid because Fox had the right of first refusal.” Sources said that CBS and ABC held similar views.

One of the reasons for calling the special academy meeting Wednesday was to consider whether options might include delaying the Emmy deal, since Fox’s first-refusal rights expire later this month, several sources said.

Jamie Kellner, president of Fox Broadcasting, took a firm stance before the meeting: “We negotiated in good faith and they (the academy) confirmed to us in writing. We have a letter agreeing to the terms.”

In a statement Thursday formally announcing Fox’s new three-year Emmy deal, Kellner said: “The Emmy Awards are top priority for Fox and have become the highlight of our broadcast year.”

According to Blumenthal, “What we tried to do at the start of the (Emmy) negotiations was work out a wheel with the three networks and Fox in a package, to satisfy everybody’s concerns. The three networks would not enter into the wheel with Fox.” But Fox, he said, had been agreeable to the idea.

A longtime executive for one of the Big Three networks said: “I think it’s a disgrace the networks don’t pick up the tab. But in this new corporate climate (NBC has been taken over by General Electric, ABC by Capital Cities and CBS by Laurence Tisch), there’s no love for what the Emmy Awards are supposed to reward. They negotiate the same as you would for a pilot. The networks should put some water back in the well because this way, the Emmy is losing its value.”

But, said the executive, “The networks want a wheel without Fox because they don’t think it’s a network.”

Fox currently has three full nights of programming--on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It has announced plans to expand to five nights by the end of 1990 and seven nights within two years. In addition, it hopes to start a network news service by January for the seven stations it owns, including KTTV, and its affiliates nationwide.

Kellner said that when the traditional networks discuss higher ratings for Emmy telecasts of the past, “they’re dealing with a three-network environment, but that doesn’t exist today. On Sunday nights, Fox is very, very competitive.”

Richard Frank, president of the Walt Disney Studios and a past president of the TV academy, agreed that Fox’s Sunday lineup has ratings impact, citing “The Simpsons” and “Married . . . With Children.” He added that in the competition for TV rights to the Emmys, the feeling seemed to be that the Big Three networks “didn’t want to be in a bidding war with Fox.”

One of the gestures that helped Fox get the Emmy rights from 1987-89 was its willingness to include broadcasts of the academy’s annual “Hall of Fame” special, which showcased new inductees into the select company of TV greats--and which the Big Three networks did not want as part of the package because it had garnered very low ratings in the past. Fox drew only 5% of the viewing audience with its recent “Hall of Fame” special, despite such honorees as the late Fred Astaire, Carroll O’Connor and Barbara Walters.

The “Hall of Fame” broadcasts now have been removed from the Emmy package, but Thursday’s announcement said that the academy will soon disclose “an important new affiliation for annually televising and sponsoring” the show--reportedly Procter & Gamble. Said James Loper, executive director of the academy: “For a long time, we have tried to disconnect the program from the Emmy Awards, and fortunately a single sponsor has come forth. It’s assured it will be on the air.”

Leo Chaloukian, the new president of the academy, and past-president Frank confirmed that discussions have also been held regarding buying the building in North Hollywood into which the academy plans to move later this year. The two-story structure, in a development called The Academy, “would probably end up” costing “between $3 million and $4 million,” Chaloukian said.

By owning the entire building “rather than sitting on the second floor,” he said, the academy could use the roughly 20,000 square feet for its goals of offering a library, archives, shows that have won awards and that “people might want to see in cubicles with headsets . . . and hopefully, if there’s room, a little museum and viewing area for Hall of Fame inductees.”