Innovation Suffers in TV Shuffle

Imagine buying a major appliance and returning it just a few weeks later to discover the people who sold it to you are no longer there. Moreover, the new staff has marginal interest in servicing your purchase, since they’re already busy trying to sell their own new line of products.

Is this any way to run a business?

The same question can be asked of the television industry, where instability within the executive ranks has become standard operating procedure and may, in roundabout fashion, be helping to prevent the networks from providing the kind of original, risk-taking programs they must to survive.

Every June, after TV programmers set their prime-time schedules for the coming year, a flurry of personnel changes take place. In the last few months, executives involved with developing programs at CBS, ABC, Fox, the USA Networks, Studios USA (the company behind “Law & Order”) and Walt Disney Television (“Home Improvement,” “Boy Meets World”) have all left or been pushed out of those positions.

All businesses experience a degree of turnover, but in television, this game of musical chairs has become an annual rite of spring. As a result, executives seldom have the luxury to engage in long-range planning, since they often find themselves either cleaning up the mess they’ve inherited from the job’s previous occupant or plotting their next career move.

Programs left over from old regimes have a habit of wilting in such a climate, since most new hires not surprisingly feel the need to prove their worth with shows for which they can claim credit. The rare exception is a series like Fox’s “Party of Five,” which has blossomed into a moderate hit under the stewardship of three entertainment division heads in its four-year run.

Those decision-makers also increasingly seem to function at the whims of corporate bosses who replace them with the sort of frequency and finesse usually reserved for professional sports franchises--not a surprise, come to think of it, given that the Dodgers and Angels are now controlled by Fox and Disney, respectively.

Beyond the lack of job security, coaching and running a network have much in common. Both rely upon a lineup of star players, who inevitably age and must be replaced. Success therefore tends to be cyclical, as stars of yesteryear--whether it’s “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson--retire and others must fill their over-sized shoes.

Putting a winning lineup together thus requires time and a little patience. Networks begin ordering scripts for new TV series roughly a year in advance, sifting through dozens of candidates before settling on what they’ll add to their prime-time schedules. Hits are always scarce, with a one-for-three batting average enough to put any producer or executive in the equivalent of baseball’s Hall of Fame.

As Dean Valentine, less than a year into his tenure as president of the UPN network, told TV critics last month: “It takes probably two to three years to cohere an entire schedule and even it out and make it fully realize your vision.”

Surveying the six broadcast networks, however, shows that only two programming chiefs--NBC’s Warren Littlefield and the WB network’s Garth Ancier--have spent four years or more in their current job. Is it a coincidence that NBC is the top-rated network and WB achieved the most substantial ratings growth last season, or that ABC has experienced a ratings decline, having watched a parade of executives come and go in recent years?

The revolving door to executive suites might be less damaging if stakes for broadcasters weren’t at an all-time high. Two decades ago even the third-place network was virtually assured a segment of the audience and significant profits, largely because few alternatives existed.

Today, network ratings have sunk to record lows while programming costs continue to rise. Only NBC is expected to make money from its network operations this year, and some describe the industry as facing a kind of paralysis, based on the assumption that there’s more to be lost in failure than gained in success. As one TV executive flatly put it: “Fear is killing the television business.”

All this has occurred, unfortunately, when high-risk fare would appear to be precisely what’s needed to slow the steady drip of viewers flowing elsewhere. Some writers, producers and studio executives say the time has come for a drastic overhaul of the business, experimenting with form-breaking creative approaches.

Yet in the current environment, with the major networks struggling merely to retain the viewers they currently reach, what executives have the time or latitude necessary to dare being innovative?

“There probably is some fear associated with losing audience,” the WB’s Ancier, an alumnus of NBC and Fox, recently said of the major networks. “It makes you more conservative in what you put on the air, thinking we’re going to try to conserve as many of our viewers as possible as opposed to saying, ‘Let’s give this a shot.’

“When I grew up at NBC under Brandon Tartikoff, he was taking shots right and left. Some of them were crazy shots. . . . We had shows that were as silly as talking dogs on the air with ‘Here’s Boomer,’ but at least it wasn’t a bunch of twentysomethings around an apartment having the same problems.”

Indeed, Tartikoff (who died a year ago) failed spectacularly with programs like “Manimal” and “The Misfits of Science,” but with the support of NBC Chairman Grant Tinker, he was able to laugh off his misfires and develop other out-there concepts that did connect commercially, among them “Alf,” “The A-Team” and “Miami Vice.”

*

With most programmers feeling tenuously tethered to their positions, cable channels and start-up networks seem better-positioned to take chances and reap the potential benefits. What major network, for example, would or even could have broadcast “South Park”--a vulgar animated series that launched a merchandising empire and thrust cable’s little-seen Comedy Central network onto the cover of Newsweek?

It’s premature, of course, to make any sweeping judgments about the coming TV season’s crop of new programs, but at first glance few look destined to generate such enthusiasm. Three dozen prime-time series will premiere on six broadcast networks between now and November, and if history proves anything, the only certainty is failures will easily outnumber the successes. Each casualty, meanwhile, opens up another time period for recently installed program developers to fill next year.

As new series falter, those within the television industry may also begin to hear music playing--a familiar tune that gives programming executives reason to wonder when the sound will stop, and if there will be a seat left for them when it does.