A Death on the Schedule

Chalk it up to bad timing. The television industry has put Columbo, “Murder, She Wrote’s” Jessica Fletcher, “Diagnosis Murder’s” Dr. Mark Sloan and the rest of their sleuthing breed out to pasture when their services would be invaluable in helping solve a perplexing mystery--namely, who killed the made-for-TV movie?

Of course, no one has actually seen the body, but most of the available evidence indicates a crime has occurred, and theories abound as to what--or who--is ultimately responsible. Although it would be nice to pin the deed on a lone perpetrator, conversations with associates of the victim suggest the involvement of more than one culpable party (think “Murder on the Orient Express”), and investigators haven’t ruled out the always popular death of 1,000 cuts.

Certain facts appear undeniable. NBC and CBS have each dropped one of their movie slots this season, reducing shelf space for those who pitch TV movie projects. Even ABC, which enjoyed some success last season with the miniseries “Anne Frank” and “Me and My Shadows: Life With Judy Garland,” has shifted to a limited strategy built around high-profile events.

At the same time, cable continues to steal the major networks’ thunder in terms of prestige. This year, all five Emmy nominees for outstanding movie came from pay cable channels--four of them from Home Box Office, which has absconded with the award seven of the past eight years.

Even if the TV movie is not dead at the major networks, as some argue, it is at the least in a period of dormancy--in the descent stage of what programmers like to remind us is a cyclical business. Moreover, producers hoping to prove that made-for-TV movies can still pack them in will have fewer opportunities to do so, which could transform the presumption that busy viewers are reluctant to commit two whole hours to a single story--as NBC officials maintain--into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While it’s easy to forget history in such a disposable media landscape, until just a few years ago, ABC, CBS and NBC each scheduled movies on Sunday nights at 9, and there was ample audience to go around. Made-for-TV movies and miniseries were not only ratings grabbers, but represented the best TV had to offer, from “The Day After” and “Something About Amelia” to “Roots” and “Shogun.”

How, then, does one explain their fall from grace? How does a business that totals $1 billion a year in production take a collective belly-flop without inspiring some sort of formal protest?

Seeking help in the search for clues, we turned to amateur sleuths with theories--not all of them mutually exclusive--about who the murderer was, from network executives in the drawing room with a budget-slashing knife to TV producers in the study with a lack of creative vision.

Joseph Stern, an executive producer on the CBS drama “Judging Amy,” blames the networks. By attempting to produce TV movies on the cheap, without increasing the licensing fees paid to suppliers, they forced producers to shift production to Canada--where costs are significantly lower--and cast second-tier actors who could be hired at union scale in supporting roles.

If viewers didn’t turn off immediately to what Stern calls an inferior product, he maintains that this assembly-line mentality took its toll. “Art is the sum of its parts,” he says. “So if you’re getting lesser actors and lesser designers, why would you assume that you’re not going to diminish the product?”

Stern points out that the audience may not have even been consciously aware of what was happening to the TV movie, but the effect was cumulative. He likened the process to his work running a small theater, where casual theatergoers become less likely to attend such productions if they have enough disappointing experiences.

“They’ve underestimated the audience all these years, and this is their comeuppance,” Stern says. “Now, it’s coming home to roost.”

One frequently cited example of the cut-rate mentality that crept into TV movies involved NBC’s strategy in the ‘90s of producing true-crime movies essentially for industry scale plus 10%, a stretch that gave viewers such memorable titles as “Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?” (starring Tori Spelling) and “Her Costly Affair.”

Stern acknowledges there is room for related theories, among them one proffered by Craig Zadan, who remains among the privileged few still thriving in the genre. With partner Neil Meron, Zadan produced the recent ABC Judy Garland biography as well as the musicals “Gypsy” and “Annie,” with other musical remakes--among them Matthew Broderick in “The Music Man”--in the pipeline.

Zadan places considerable blame--or, perhaps more accurately, credit--at the feet of former HBO executive Robert Cooper, who was largely responsible for carving out HBO’s foothold in movies, which dovetailed with the channel’s promotional slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”

“The HBO movie started a very slow erosion of the network TV market,” Zadan says. “There was a new form of movie: It wasn’t like a TV movie, and it wasn’t like a feature film. It was an HBO movie. It was something different. And it became very attractive.”

Unfettered by the vagaries of pleasing advertisers and haggling with censors, HBO offered bigger budgets, more daring subject matter, and even movie stars who--despite their reluctance to be seen on television--bought into the notion that being seen on HBO wouldn’t instantly terminate their viability in features. Such performers were also often willing to slash their usual salary demands in order to appear in passion projects--such as the abortion-themed “If These Walls Could Talk”--that would show them off in a flattering way. By producing only a handful of movies each year, the pay channel could also lovingly market its films in a way no network could afford to with dozens of made-for-TV movies to promote.

HBO also presented thought-provoking topics--from the AIDS-themed “And the Band Played On” to the corporate shenanigans of “Barbarians at the Gate”--at a time when advertiser boycotts made network executives fidget, while producers of theatrical films increasingly abandoned more cerebral fare to pursue the next sequel blockbuster.

In addition, other cable channels gradually joined the fray. Although unable or unwilling to sink limited programming budgets into series, they began spending heavily on movies designed to garner attention and reinforce their particular “brand”--from westerns on TNT to historical pieces on A&E.;

For his part, Cooper insists HBO didn’t foster the demise of the network movie. “I plead not guilty,” says the executive, who currently runs Landscape Entertainment, an independent production company financed in part by Canada’s CTV network.

According to Cooper, nothing precluded the major networks from exploring more challenging material, and the current retrenchment may work to their benefit. “I don’t think that’s such a bad strategy for the networks, to make fewer movies and make them well,” he says.

Still, others say the networks damaged TV movies by exerting too much control over the creative process--transforming the form, as one veteran of the business put it, “from a producers’ medium to a programming executives’ medium.” Instead of a producer with passion for a given project, the movie became the province of some development executive with a predetermined formula and a quota to fill.

A patch of creative bankruptcy clearly occurred with the reliance on true-crime stories in the 1990s--epitomized by the tell-tale window in 1993 when three networks piled on with their own versions of the Amy Fisher “Long Island Lolita” story. The same year, the networks found themselves shut out in the made-for-TV movie category at the Emmy awards, prompting Times columnist Rick Du Brow to note that broadcasters were receiving a well-deserved rebuke for “virtually ceding the quality audience to alternative TV such as cable and VCRs, while seeking a quick fix by pushing the meaning of lowest-common-denominator even lower.”

There were other problems too. Newsmagazines began filling prime time as the networks grew more obsessed with the bottom line, churning out the sort of heart-tugging, three-hankie stories--”They killed her daughter. But she chose to fight back”--that often provided grist for TV movies. Dramatic series, meanwhile, became more issue-oriented, with standard cop shows being supplanted by dramas like “ER,” “Picket Fences” or “Law & Order” that weren’t afraid to dive into waters--from abortion to incest--that once belonged to TV movies alone.

Seeking to adapt, NBC seized upon big, magical fantasies featuring mythical or biblical themes such as “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The Odyssey” and “Noah’s Ark”--mega-budgeted productions, many of them from producer Robert Halmi Sr.

Promoted heavily during the network’s “Must-See TV” Thursday-night lineup, Halmi’s gigantic, special effects-laden epics yielded blockbuster ratings and a brief resurgence for the miniseries; however, they also raised the stakes of the game, and when those productions inevitably began to yield less-epic ratings as they proliferated, the staggering cost turned them into huge albatrosses.

Having witnessed this typical act of entertainment-industry cannibalism, Zadan notes that he and Meron are determined to resist making that mistake with musicals, trying rather to keep them rare in order to keep them special. “The inclination is always, ‘This works big time, let’s do it a lot,”’ Zadan says, adding that in the long term, fewer movies may, indeed, mean more quality and thus benefit viewers as well as the genre.

So who really shot down the TV movie? Short-sighted, tight-fisted, controlling network executives? Cable channels with grander visions and the resources to realize them? Newsmagazines that began eschewing real news in favor of “stories”? Dramas that became more dramatic? Or the inevitable truth that the bigger you get, the harder you fall?

Even Columbo and his ilk might be hard-pressed to identify a lone gunman. Yet as mysteries go, this one has more twists than anything to emerge from the network movie departments in the last few years--which, come to think of it, provides a pretty good clue as to where any would-be crime-solver might begin sniffing to pick up the scent. *