NBC’s ‘seaQuest’: Seaworthy or Treading Water? : Television: The series is battling ABC’s ‘Superman’ for second place in a crucial Sunday time spot.

From outward appearances, NBC’s underwater adventure series “seaQuest DSV,” one of the biggest network gambles in years, is struggling to stay afloat.

With the backing of executive producer Steven Spielberg and series star Roy Scheider as the captain of a futuristic submarine, the high-priced “seaQuest” was designed to gather masses of families around the electronic hearth Sundays at 8 p.m., when TV viewing reaches a weekly zenith. It was also supposed to herald the return of action-adventure TV series--which had become too costly--to the broadcast networks.

An armada of promotion and publicity resulted in a spectacular two-hour debut on Sept. 12 with 47 million people watching, but the series was greeted with disastrous reviews and, in the weeks that followed, the ratings plunged dramatically. Nearly 39% of the original audience was gone a month later.

Now “seaQuest” finds itself locked in a battle to maintain a distant second place in the time period behind the hugely successful “Murder, She Wrote” on CBS. “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” ABC’s updated romantic comedy based on the old DC Comics character, has recently caught up to “seaQuest” in the ratings.

But, as NBC will quickly point out, all is not as it appears on the surface. Even if the show hasn’t lived up to the great expectations engendered by the participation of Spielberg, fresh off the summer success of “Jurassic Park,” network executives maintain that it is a legitimate success story for NBC.

“From an advertiser’s point of view, from a revenue point of view, ‘seaQuest’ has absolutely been a success story,” said Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment. “Advertisers want to be in it, and it wins its time period with adults 18 to 49. That’s a tremendous accomplishment for a freshman series, and a great asset.”

In a vote of confidence for “seaQuest,” which is undergoing creative revisions to make the stories and characters more compelling, NBC ordered two more episodes last week.

With “seaQuest,” Littlefield said, NBC has finally found a toehold Sundays at 8 p.m., the linchpin that holds together a network schedule. A solid 8 p.m. series leads into the 9 p.m. network movies and provides a promotional platform for the coming week.

“Look at the last five years in that time period,” Littlefield said. “What we had was: A show goes in, a show goes out. We haven’t had this kind of success, stability or performance since ‘Family Ties’ was in the time period (in 1989).”

Betsy Frank, senior vice president of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, observed that “seaQuest” is a significant improvement over the previous occupant, “I Witness Video.” “NBC on Sunday was doing some dismal numbers last season, so they have to feel some positive spin from this,” she said.

When the networks sold their ad time for the fall season, NBC got more money for 30-second commercials on “seaQuest” than CBS did for “Murder, She Wrote.” Even though “Murder, She Wrote” is a Top 10 series in household ratings, most of the viewers watching are older ones in whom most advertisers are not especially interested.

Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC West Coast, said that if “seaQuest” maintains its current ratings, it would almost certainly be back next season--although that decision probably won’t be made until May.

Although “seaQuest” finishes in the middle of the Nielsen pack each week in terms of total viewership, it ranks No. 16 among all prime-time series with people 18 to 49. And a further breakdown reveals that “seaQuest” consistently ranks among the top three with young adults in the number of “viewers per viewing household.” In other words, when “seaQuest” is on, lots of young adults are gathered around the TV set watching it. In the same category, “Murder, She Wrote” ranks last.

“That means the kind of audience most advertisers want is there in ‘seaQuest,’ ” said Joel Segal, executive vice president of national broadcasting for the advertising agency McCann-Erickson. “The show has turned out to be a pretty good deal for advertisers.”

Now if NBC could only do something about “Lois & Clark.” With “Murder, She Wrote” attracting the older viewers, and Fox offering solid counter-programming with the comedies “Martin” and “Living Single,” the young adult viewers interested in drama are being split between “seaQuest” and “Lois & Clark.” The only real difference is that “Lois & Clark” attracts slightly more women and “seaQuest” draws more men.

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“It’s like a game of chicken between the two networks to see who’s going to blink and who’s going to move first,” said Paul Schulman, president of the advertising agency Paul Schulman Co. “The real problem is, you have two shows with the same appeal opposite each other, and they are fragmenting that audience, and neither one is getting the audience they could achieve without that competition.”

“There’s an unacknowledged feeling, probably at each network, that if the other one were to blink and move the show away, the remaining program would perform 50% better,” said Alan Sternfeld, senior vice president of program planning and scheduling for ABC Entertainment.

Last year at this time, NBC blinked first by moving “Seinfeld” to Thursday from Wednesday, where it had been airing opposite the ABC powerhouse “Home Improvement.” The result: “Seinfeld” broke out this season to become the No. 4 show on television.

But that isn’t as likely to happen in this case, because Sunday nights are too important to concede.

“From a scheduler’s standpoint, a move has to work at both ends,” Sternfeld said. “Every now and then, I wish out loud that NBC would move ‘seaQuest,’ but I can’t imagine that they would. There are these locked-horn struggles that the networks find themselves in. Because there’s no decided advantage here, nobody knows what the obvious move is other than to stay put. You have two shows that play to a standoff.”

Executives at NBC took a rare risk in the economically depressed world of network TV when they ordered a full season’s worth of 22 episodes of “seaQuest” for a steep license fee of $1 million per episode--which is the only way Spielberg would agree to the deal. And that was without the benefit of seeing a pilot episode.

The network officials maintain that the price is not much higher than the $850,000 to $900,000 license fees for most new one-hour dramas and, considering the solid demographics of “seaQuest,” believe they are not paying too much.

That’s not to say that, halfway through the season, they’re not trying to improve the show’s current performance.

“We think we’re looking at potential,” Littlefield said. “I’ve said to everybody creatively involved in the show (that) what many of the critics have written about the show is very fair and accurate. We need to tell better stories. We need to learn more about who these people are, who our series cast regulars are.”

To that end, Patrick Hasburgh, who created “21 Jump Street,” was brought in early last month to help produce and write “seaQuest.” Executive producer David Burke was reportedly working around the clock and needed help. Universal Television and Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment were somewhat frazzled, taking short cuts and making compromises to pull off the logistical and special-effects demands of the series, Littlefield said.

Now the production is running more smoothly, and Littlefield expects the improved episodes to start showing up on the air in January. He thinks ratings will improve at the same time, because ESPN will wrap up its Sunday night football coverage, which NBC executives feel has been siphoning off the strong male audience “seaQuest” enjoys.