Networks Debating Delaying the Fall Season

Although the globe keeps spinning, sometimes in the world of television, 52 weeks don’t equal a year.

Just how long the broadcast year should run is currently at issue thanks to an arcane skirmish over the start of the 2000-2001 television season, which should begin on Sept. 18.

Most of the major networks, however, are lobbying for a later new-season launch, citing NBC’s broadcast of the 2000 Olympics from Sydney, Australia, which will run from Sept. 15 through Oct. 1 and significantly alter the regular playing field in terms of ratings.

Officials from the seven broadcast networks met earlier this week with representatives from ratings service Nielsen Media Research, but their opinions are split: NBC favors the traditional mid-September start, while ABC, CBS and Fox advocate moving the season back to Oct. 2, maintaining the Summer Games would unfairly skew prime-time results.

UPN and the WB didn’t take positions, while Pax TV--the No. 7 broadcast network, in which NBC now holds a 32% interest through a $400-million transaction in September--not surprisingly sided with NBC.

“There was no consensus,” said Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus. “We decided everyone should take deep cleansing breaths, and we’ll meet again. . . . We hope we’ll have agreement.”

Due to a vagary of the calendar, the TV season has run 53 weeks at times in the past to push the opening back just past mid-September. The season has been delayed before on other grounds as well--most notably 1988, when the official start was held until mid-October due to a strike by the Writers Guild of America.

For all the hoopla that surrounds this annual ritual, there remains no official mechanism to determine when the TV season begins. For years, in fact, the date was set--and all such disputes settled--by the late Bob Knight, a reporter at the industry trade paper Variety.

Nielsen now seeks to peg the start to when the networks roll out the bulk of their new programs. In that respect, most of NBC’s competitors will delay their new-series launches until October, not wanting to challenge the Olympics for attention from viewers.

Still, in recent years broadcasters have often staggered premiere patterns--introducing shows as early as August and as late as November--hoping to get a jump on the competition, making when new episodes begin airing a somewhat hazy standard.

Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and media development, said it simply makes sense to keep the start date fixed, disregarding events such as the Olympics, so there is a consistent benchmark for gauging television’s performance from year to year.

Moreover, even October will be full of prime-time preemptions this year related to the national election in November, including presidential debates.

“If you really want to start the season under ‘normal’ circumstances, it would be November, and that would be during sweeps,” Wurtzel noted.

At present, the official television season runs from mid-September through the rating sweeps in May. Broadcasters still enjoy claiming bragging rights in regard to how they fare during that stretch, although most have stated a desire to place more emphasis on the summer months, when networks have traditionally put out the equivalent of a “Gone fishin’ ” sign by scheduling mostly reruns.