CBS’ Battle Plan Pays Off : Network Concentrates on Mainstream Shows as NBC Falters

CBS has discovered the comfort zone of war-weary television viewers.

Easy-to-take specials with Glenn Close and Cher, along with agreeable series such as “Murder, She Wrote” and “Murphy Brown,” have not only given temporary relaxation to CBS audiences but also lifted fortunes at the last-place network.

Ratings for the February sweeps--which help set ad rates for stations--actually showed CBS ahead at midweek, although all of the Big Three networks were bunching up again.

Nothing epitomized viewers’ desire for simpler times more than Close’s Sunday CBS special, “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” about a woman who answers a farmer’s ad for a wife. With a whopping 36% audience share, it bolted the network to the top in the sweeps.

“Cher . . . at the Mirage,” a Monday CBS special from the Las Vegas hotel, registered a 21% share with its glamorous escapism from the world’s hard realities--a solid enough ratings showing at a time when TV musicals are in audience disfavor.

With comfortable old CBS favorites such as “Knots Landing” and “Designing Women” also holding their own, the network was the only one of the Big Three to register audience gains over last year in the first week of the sweeps.

As the Big Three negotiate their schedules through the wartime atmosphere, it is clear that major changes are taking place at the networks.

NBC’s five-season dominance of prime time, anchored by “The Cosby Show,” is over. The network has lost in the ratings for three consecutive weeks. And even if it is No. 1 again for the season, it will be close; the one-time powerhouse now is just another struggling broadcast company.

When NBC made the excuse this week that the war had disrupted its schedule, it apparently forgot that ABC and CBS are also affected by the Gulf War.

Knowing last autumn that it was slumping, NBC touted this season’s new series, especially “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” as its best entries in years. But all the networks bombed with their new shows.

NBC also lost the full guidance of the man who shaped its dominance, Brandon Tartikoff, when he was involved in a serious auto accident on New Year’s Day.

So vulnerable has NBC become that the producers of its top-rated series, “Cheers” and “The Cosby Show,” knowing that the network is scrambling, have been able to make exorbitant financial demands to assure their return, with the outcomes still in doubt.

How all of this will sit with NBC’s owner, General Electric, which demands top performance from its subsidiaries, will be of increasing concern to the network if it continues to slip.

In a curious coincidence, CBS’ decision this season to experiment less than NBC and ABC--and concentrate on building solid mainstream shows--is probably paying off during during the war crisis as viewers seek traditional, less-demanding entertainment.

Although CBS News has been getting walloped during the Gulf War--again raising the question of whether Dan Rather will be replaced or get a co-anchor--the network’s entertainment division has done well, given its disastrous record in recent years.

Under Jeff Sagansky, the new president of CBS Entertainment, and his top aide, Peter Tortorici, the network has finished first once and second five times in the past six weeks.

With no new breakout show this season, and the three networks in a neck-and-neck race, the winner each week is often determined by a movie or special, usually on Sunday nights. And CBS has shown an aptitude for choosing and promoting such winners.

“Sarah, Plain and Tall” was one such CBS example. And this Sunday, CBS hopes to score again with “Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter,” a drama that has been sharply criticized by actress Lucie Arnaz for the content of its story about her parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, in the years leading up to “I Love Lucy.”

Of all the networks, however, ABC seems best equipped to meet the demands of wartime programming--and the future. By far the most dominant network in news, it is commanding the most viewers in its Gulf coverage. And its solid entertainment lineup is loaded with comedies, the most popular form of TV escapism in times of crisis.

ABC has been No. 1 in the ratings the last two weeks--and it is a safe assumption that its war coverage contributed to its strong showing as viewers stayed with the network.

Impressively, ABC won last week’s ratings even without its top hit, “Roseanne,” which was preempted by President Bush’s State of the Union address.

But the slack was taken up by such other ABC comedies as “Full House,” “Family Matters,” “Who’s the Boss?,” “The Wonder Years,” “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “America’s Funniest People.”

Significantly, as viewers sought escapism, the highest-rated drama series--aside from the lightweight “Murder, She Wrote”--was NBC’s “L.A. Law,” which finished down in 25th place.

NBC’s well-watched war coverage could not obscure the fact of the network’s entertainment slide. The tightened Big Three race is primarily the result of NBC dropping sharply and coming back to the pack.

Through midweek, NBC’s prime-time ratings were 27% lower than for the same sweeps period last year--a loss of about 3 million TV households. ABC was off by 12%, or about 1.2 million households.

CBS, meanwhile, was up 3%, or roughly 370,000 TV homes. And that had to be encouraging to the network, which is depending on Sagansky to put it back in business. CBS has dug its own hole, especially in news, where cutbacks have decimated the once-powerful division.

Thus far, Sagansky has seemingly held his entertainment programming together with spit and glue and smart promotion. You can’t win forever with specials. Thus, he has signed such talents as Rob Reiner, Stephen King and Carrie Fisher to develop weekly series, the backbone of any prime-time schedule.

In the long run, though, the most fascinating prime-time development may be what, if any, effect the Gulf War has on network programming. In the 1960s, for instance, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brought about a lessening of violence on the home screen.

John Mantley, who produced the Western series “Gunsmoke,” has said of that period, “After the assassinations, there was a tremendous feeling of revulsion against violence, and TV became the scapegoat for that violence. All of a sudden, every producer who had to make an action-adventure show had to figure out how to make it without action or adventure.”

With the Gulf War unfolding, there may be enough action and adventure on TV to last viewers for quite some time.