Deal Keeps ‘Designing Women’ at CBS for Years : Television: In its first exclusive agreement, the network will buy five series during the next eight years, paying at least $45 million to $50 million.

CBS Inc. has signed one of Hollywood’s top producing teams to a long-term contract that will keep the creators of “Designing Women” at the network for up to eight years.

The deal is the first of its kind for the third-place network, which until now has stayed on the sidelines while ABC signed costly series commitments with several sought-after production outfits.

CBS has contracted to buy five series through 1998 from Mozark Productions Inc., owned by the husband-and-wife team Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason. They created and produce “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade,” two of the network’s most popular programs.

During the past two years, exclusive deals have become increasingly popular between networks and proven producers because of the belief that they reduce the risk of expensive flops.

ABC has exclusive deals with Steven Bochco, James Brooks and the husband-and-wife team of Neal Marlens and Carol Black.

The CBS deal calls for the network to buy five series during the next eight years, with minimum orders of 13 episodes for each show. The agreement, which will cost the network at least $45 million to $50 million, is exclusive for the first three years, after which CBS has a “first look” option.

In an unusual twist, CBS will own the fifth show to emerge from the deal. The network will also pay the team a $3-million up-front “signing bonus” when the deal become effective Jan. 1, according to sources.

Additionally, CBS has committed to finance nearly the entire deficit on each series through “non-recourse loans” to Mozark that would not be repayable until after a series has been aired for three years. Typically, a network’s license fee does not cover the full production cost of a show--a practice in the industry known as “deficit financing.”

Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, said the network would strike a limited number of such deals in the future with certain valued producers. “There are not going to be a string of them,” he said. “There will just be a few, but they will be large.”

The network’s willingness to finance nearly the entire deficit of each show is significant because it signals a dramatic shift in the relationship between independent producers and the major Hollywood studios that supply the overwhelming majority of TV programs to the networks.

Producers such as the Thomasons have had to go to the studios to finance the deficits on their shows. The studios, in turn, have taken a percentage of the rerun profits when the series is eventually sold in syndication.

More important, however, the deal creates some uncertainty in the Thomasons’ relationship with Columbia Pictures Television, which has a lucrative syndication contract for “Designing Women.”

By the end of the current TV season, 115 episodes of “Designing Women” will have been produced, and Columbia is getting ready to sell the re-runs to local TV stations or a cable network. Many sitcoms earn $1 million per episode in syndication, so the re-run profits for Columbia could be greater than those of a blockbuster film.

But with CBS willing to finance a majority of the deficits arising from the five-series commitment, there is less incentive for the Thomasons to negotiate a distribution deal with Columbia. They could, instead, have an independent distributor sell the re-runs for a lower percentage of the profits.

Columbia, however, still has a leg up if it wants the distribution rights to the forthcoming Thomason shows--which easily could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars for the studio--because it can advance them a huge sum against syndication proceeds.

Earlier this year, Columbia advanced the producers Ron Leavitt and Michael Moye $34 million against future syndication revenues of “Married With Children.”