Disney Will Stop Making One-Hour Television Shows

Walt Disney Co., which has spent heavily over the past two years to buy its way into the network television programming business, will no longer produce one-hour drama shows.

The decision follows a review by the studio that concluded it could never recoup its substantial investment in the production of such programs.

Disney, along with Columbia Pictures Television, has led the way among Hollywood studios in bidding up the price paid for top writers and producers. Much of the bidding war has involved comedy writers, but writers of one-hour shows have also been swept up in the mania.

Disney is expected to honor its commitment to NBC to produce “Hull High” and another unspecified series, both one-hour shows. But executives in the Disney drama department will be reassigned to other areas of the company and no more deals with drama writers are expected to be made.

A spokeswoman for Disney late Friday said executives were at a taping of “Lenny,” a new comedy series for CBS, and could not be reached for comment.

Although Disney placed three new shows on the networks’ schedules this fall, the studio nevertheless has been bedeviled in making one-hour shows. Several one-hour pilots that Disney developed were never sold to the networks, and one that was bought by ABC was dropped by the network.

One-hour shows have been a major dilemma for the studios in recent years. The networks continue to need them to provide diversity in their schedules, but the cost of producing one-hour shows has long outweighed any benefit to the producers.

Until recently, studios have counted on the foreign marketplace to help recoup the cost of making one-hour shows. Drama shows, because they are produced on film with several cameras and location settings, now average above $1.2 million per hour to make. But the networks, in an effort to hold down costs, refuse usually to pay more than $600,000 to $700,000 for the rights to air them.

The result is that studios routinely incur deficits of $500,000 or more on the production of one-hour shows. Multiplied over a season of 22 episodes, this can cost $11 million per series.

In recent months the booming international marketplace for one-hour programs has shown signs of beginning to slow as networks in Europe have filled their quotas of American-made television programs. Studios, therefore, can no longer rely on foreign sales of TV shows to help cover the substantial deficits they incur.