For KABC, It’s a New ‘Monday Night’ Game
After agreeing last month to pay nearly $500 million a season for the rights to continue televising “Monday Night Football,” ABC decided to move the starting time of the games up one hour--to 8 p.m. on the East Coast and 5 p.m. here.
The earlier kickoff will surely boost ratings in the eastern half of the country, where the games often dragged on past midnight.
But the new strategy, to be instituted when the football season begins in September, has created a problem, or at least a large programming hole, for ABC stations here in the Pacific Time Zone. Games will end between 8 and 8:30 p.m., sticking stations like KABC-TV Channel 7 with at least 2 1/2 hours of empty prime time.
In the past, Channel 7 and ABC’s other West Coast affiliates were left with no more than a 60-minute hole each Monday night because the games ended later and ABC also supplied an hour of series programming, such as “MacGyver” or this past fall’s “Timecop,” which aired before football in the East and after the game in the West.
But now that football will occupy all three hours of prime time in much of the country, the network will no longer have to schedule anything else on Mondays, forcing stations out West to fend for themselves.
KABC has yet to settle on a solution but General Manager Arnold Kleiner says he isn’t worried.
“We’re OK with it,” Kleiner said. “Obviously for us it’s a little better when the game starts at 6, but we’re fine. The important thing is that we were able to retain football.”
There are actually potential benefits to the new plan, he said.
The obvious plus is that the number of people watching in prime time is far greater than in the afternoon hours generally retained by stations for local programming. If Channel 7 is able to offer local programs in prime time that retain a large portion of the football audience, the potential advertising revenue for the station is substantial.
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The problem, of course, is the formidable competition from the other networks--all of which will be airing their usual prime-time lineups.
Kleiner said that the station is considering a number of possibilities to fill the gap, including a local newscast, theatrical movies, syndicated dramas and its sports variety show, “Monday Night Live.” He said he hopes to have a lineup set in the next month or two.
“Monday Night Live,” hosted by KABC sportscaster Todd Donaho, has aired since 1989 as filler between the end of the game and the network series programs at 10 p.m. Kleiner said that it has been a financial success for years. Its live format also makes it flexible, meaning it can begin whenever the game ends and run for however many minutes the station needs to fill.
A live newscast also sounds attractive for the same reason, and because the 5 p.m. game time will displace the hour of local news the station usually airs then. In addition, local news competition in prime time is scarce--only KCAL-TV Channel 9 presents local news between 8 and 10 p.m. And since the KABC news crew is on duty at that time in preparation for its nightly 11 p.m. broadcast anyway, an additional newscast in prime time would cost little.
The station would have to spend money to acquire movies or syndicated dramas, but if they click, these entertainment shows have the potential to draw larger audiences than news in prime time. And it may be unrealistic to expect the station to maintain a sizable audience with 2 1/2 hours of local programming in prime time. If the ratings drop too much, especially during the 10 o’clock hour, it would likely damage the numbers for the lucrative 11 p.m. newscast.
All of this schedule shifting becomes moot come January, however, when the football season ends and prime time reverts to ABC--which will be forced to build Monday nights from scratch.
But Kleiner said that starting all over in January won’t handicap the network. This season, for example, ABC started from nothing in January because “Timecop,” the show it scheduled last fall as a companion to “Monday Night Football,” performed miserably and was canceled.