It’s the Show, Not the Network, That Keeps Viewers Watching

Every now and then, I feel absolutely compelled to wolf down a Big Mac. Such urges come over me despite a keen awareness that these morsels contain enough fat grams to sink a small ship, helping render all that stationary bike riding and pickup basketball depressingly moot.

This compulsion does not stem from fuzzy childhood memories of clowns, inherent goodwill toward Golden Arches or heartwarming commercials showing a senior citizen donning a funny cap and returning to the work force. It has to do rather with the sheer joy of Secret Sauce and cheese. In short, the loyalty is not to McDonald’s brand but to its hamburgers.

No, you haven’t stumbled into the Food section by mistake. This confession has to do with television, because TV networks these days constantly discuss “branding,” heralding the establishment of network-wide identities as a vital marketing tool to stand out amid all the clutter and chaos across the dial.

“Branding” has become a favorite buzzword among executives, who love talking about the value of their particular brands, from “Must See TV” to ABC’s “TGIF” lineup. Fox describes its brand as being “a little more adventurous, a little more edgy” (translation: more rude and crude) than the other networks’.

The new season is full of what might be called brand extensions. There are second versions of “Law & Order,” “Moesha” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and more “Felicity” and “Dawson’s Creek” wannabes than you can shake a stick at.

From a network’s perspective, this is understandable. The WB wants you to watch “Buffy” on Tuesdays and stay around for the show that follows. What better way to do so, they surmise, than expand the “ ‘Buffy’ brand” by adding the spinoff “Angel” in the adjacent hour--in essence offering up “Buffy” with cheese.

Yet to viewers, branding doesn’t mean much. In fact, the whole concept sounds just this side of insulting at a time when the remote control has become ubiquitous, freeing people to channel-surf, finding whatever it is they want to watch.

Granted, it’s helpful to have an idea where you might want to begin looking by having a sense of what’s on each channel. Cable networks have clearly done this: People turn to CNN for news, ESPN equals sports and Nickelodeon enjoys a special bond with kids.

That said, no matter how much my sports-addled mind loves ESPN and its sundry spinoff channels, whatever loyalty they command won’t inspire me to watch auto racing, fencing or curling. If they throw on some college basketball or football, we can talk.

What this demonstrates is that people watch programs, not networks; indeed, many viewers can’t even identify the network carrying their favorite shows, connecting series only with the channel on which they air.

In the case of this fall’s prime-time lineup, of course, several networks appear to be peddling the same product--what might be defined as the young, attractive, white, high school-prep school-”Help! I just graduated from college and don’t know what to do with my life!” brand.

Yet even a well-defined brand is no substitute for putting on compelling programs--especially for the broadcast networks, which can’t be as interest-specific (yet, anyway) as cable channels. Simplistic as it sounds, then, this network mantra about branding won’t yield much if their hamburgers, as it were, taste lousy, a point WB chief executive Jamie Kellner echoed last week. “If they’re good shows, they’ll work, and if they’re not good shows, they’ll fail,” he said flatly.

Finally, a historical note: TV shows have traditionally established what a network’s brand will be, not the other way around.

This often happens unwittingly. In Fox’s infancy, executives didn’t have any clue that they wanted to be “edgy” and youth-oriented. One of their first comedies, “Mr. President,” starred George C. Scott as the president of the United States; another, “Karen’s Song,” featured Patty Duke as a divorced woman involved with a younger man.

*

Today, those same roles would be played by “Party of Five’s” Scott Wolf and Jennifer Love Hewitt--the former granted a waiver from the 35 or older rule to serve as president, the latter angering her parents by dating an 18-year-old singer in a grunge rock band.

Fox’s personality didn’t come into being until “Married . . . With Children,” “In Living Color” and “The Simpsons” paved the way, an evolution that might be dismissed as a fluke if the same thing hadn’t happened to Madison Avenue’s current darling, the WB. After setting out to attract a “family audience” with a dancing frog mascot and sitcoms aimed at kids and their parents, the network stumbled into a promised land filled with teenage girls and young women thanks to “Buffy,” “Dawson’s Creek” and “7th Heaven.”

In short, branding is no substitute for the germ of inspiration, the thrill of seeing something a little new, different and unexpected. Airing such shows requires more risk and imagination than seizing on a formula that appears to work and cloning it into extinction, an approach seemingly doomed to fail in an age when the average viewer receives nearly 50 channels and 500 channels is no longer the stuff of science fiction. People may cut programs some slack for a moment, but if they don’t measure up to the programs they seek to emulate--Zap!--and away they go.

If branding does have any real validity, it’s primarily in the negative--that is, some shows are incompatible with certain networks. CBS, with the oldest audience profile among the major broadcasters, won’t attract big ratings for a series about inner-city teens, any more than a program built around “Murder, She Wrote’s” Angela Lansbury is likely to thrive on the WB, whose average viewer would be surprised to learn that the fathers of Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen are actors, too.

Network types do merit a little sympathy. Not only have they spent the last week defending their record on racial diversity to a room full of mostly white TV critics, they will also spend more than ever before this year trying to generate even minimal awareness of their new programs, a task that calls for considerable ingenuity as the number of people watching them continues to decline.

Branding offers these weary souls at least some theoretical comfort, the hope that fans of “thirtysomething” crave a new show from its creators, ABC’s “Once and Again,” which might as easily be dubbed “thirtysomething 2000.”

But really, you might say, simply running off copies of what is popular, or once was? How could that possibly succeed? After all, it sounds like . . . well, come to think of it, just about every other TV season of the last few decades.

Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.