Cosby’s ‘Bet Your Life’ Loses to Poor Ratings : Television: The syndicated series, which has performed modestly across the country but hasn’t done well in key markets, won’t be getting a second season.

Bill Cosby, television’s biggest star during the 1980s, has struck out with his first post-”Cosby Show” venture. The syndicated, Cosby-hosted series “You Bet Your Life” won’t be coming back for a second season, the distribution company said Friday.

The most highly anticipated syndicated show this season, “You Bet Your Life” has performed modestly across the country, but ratings in such important cities as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago have been bad. In the last few weeks, several stations have pulled the show off the air or moved it out of the key 6-8 p.m. time period for which it was intended.

“It is our determination that failure to register a significant audience share in certain key markets argues for moving on to new projects,” a statement from the Carsey-Werner Co. said.

“You Bet Your Life,” a revival of the 1950s comical game show that starred Groucho Marx, will complete taping the last one-third of the 195 half-hour episodes that were sold to stations. With that many episodes, there may be an opportunity for Carsey-Werner to sell reruns into syndication--or perhaps to a game-show channel in development for cable-TV systems.

Based on the star power of Cosby--who revived the near-dead sitcom format in the 1980s with “The Cosby Show” while establishing NBC as the No. 1 network--Carsey-Werner had guaranteed advertisers a phenomenal 10 rating for “You Bet Your Life” out of the gate (each ratings point represents 931,000 households).

But during the November ratings sweeps, it averaged less than half of that. The program’s current national average of 4.6 is still strong for a new syndicated series, especially one that airs every day, but not strong enough for the time slots it was sold for.

Slotted in the important hour before prime time, “You Bet Your Life” faced such stiff, entrenched competition as “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy!,” “Entertainment Tonight” and “Hard Copy.”

KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles was among the first to shuffle “You Bet Your Life,” pulling the program two weeks ago to test “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol,” a reality series supplied by another syndication company, Genesis Entertainment.

Although final numbers are not yet in, about 343,000 households in the Los Angeles-Orange County market tuned into “Highway Patrol” each night during its first week on the air, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. That compares to the 222,000 households that “You Bet Your Life” averaged on KCBS during November.

KCBS said Friday that “You Bet Your Life” will return to the air Monday at 7 p.m. and will remain on the weeknight schedule until March 15, when “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” will return full time. What happens to the Cosby show at that point hasn’t been determined, a spokeswoman said.

No one seems certain why “You Bet Your Life” did not fare better.

“We sought to remain as faithful to the original format as possible, but it’s conceivable that this simply wasn’t sufficiently hard-edged . . . for certain urban areas in this decade,” Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner said in their statement.

When Marx hosted the original “You Bet Your Life” from 1950 to 1961, there were only a few television viewing choices, not 30 or more as there are in most homes today. And there certainly was nothing like “Studs” on the air.

One competing distributor and syndication consultant suggested that “You Bet Your Life” was really a talk show masquerading as a quiz show, and consequently lacked an identity.

“If you look at the audience for the game-show format, it tends to be a little older,” the distributor said. “And those are people who like to play along with a game. I’m not certain those people are looking for a comedian to ad lib his way through 22 minutes, even one as talented as Bill Cosby.

“If they were looking for laughs, there’s a lot of sitcom reruns airing in that time period that they can watch.”

“You Bet Your Life” is not the first series in Cosby’s career to fail. For every “I Spy,” “Fat Albert” or “Cosby Show,” there was a “Cos,” a failed prime-time kids variety show in 1976, or “The Bill Cosby Show,” a sitcom that lasted two seasons in the early 1970s.

“You Bet Your Life” was Carsey-Werner’s first foray into the world of syndication. In fact, at one time NBC reportedly tried to buy “You Bet Your Life” for prime time. Carsey-Werner, which also produced “The Cosby Show,” opted instead to move into syndication because the payoff for a hit show is significantly higher. The company said it will continue to develop programs for syndication.

Because “You Bet Your Life” regularly finishes in the Top 20 of all syndicated programs, Carsey-Werner could have accepted time-slot downgrades in trying to sell the show for next season. But worse time slots will only lead to worse ratings. And “You Bet Your Life” may be too expensive to afford lower ratings, which means lower advertising revenue.

“Not only are they paying Cosby a lot of money, but they are shooting the show long and then editing it down to length,” one syndication source said. The unscripted “You Bet Your Life” does, in fact, work that way to give Cosby a chance to kid around more and ad lib with his guests.

“That’s a very expensive way to make a show,” the syndicator said. “The only viable place for it is ‘access’ (the period immediately before prime time). To try to run the show earlier in the day, there just wouldn’t be a big enough audience.”

For the most part, station managers seemed to be more preoccupied with fixing their schedules than trying to figure out why “You Bet Your Life” did not work.

“When we looked at the new shows last fall, we wanted the program with the very best chance of winning, and that was Bill Cosby,” said Jeff Rosser, general manager of KDFW-TV in Dallas. Rosser began losing ratings when he replaced “Hard Copy” with “You Bet Your Life” in September. Two weeks ago, he returned “Hard Copy” to its original time slot and ratings have been improving.

“I was among many out there who believed that ‘You Bet Your Life’ would do very well,” he said. “I’m sorry that it did not.”