A Net Gain From Fewer Channels?

The idea started percolating as a friend lamented how there was an oversupply of, well, pretty much everything on television, from the slew of college basketball games televised at all hours to the flood of sitcoms and movies he couldn’t imagine anyone finding time to watch--volume that clearly outstrips the available stash of creativity, he suggested, if a network felt compelled to serve up a remake of “Brian’s Song,” as ABC did Sunday.

Then a vision began to take shape. The sports pages have been abuzz regarding major league baseball owners’ push for contraction, or eliminating a couple of teams, to improve the health of their business--a maneuver designed to benefit the remaining franchises financially but which pundits also presume would augment the quality of play, which was diluted by previous expansion.

Scanning results from the November rating sweeps, it’s hard not to wonder if broadcasters might be inclined to do the same--the most promising candidate for contraction being ABC, which is springing leaks on so many fronts an octopus on amphetamines would be hard-pressed to bail out the Disney-owned network before the water covers its mouse ears.

A quick inventory of ABC’s lineup this season finds “Monday Night Football” in decline, sitcom staples “Spin City,” “The Drew Carey Show” and “Dharma & Greg” down sharply, and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” ebbing into mediocrity. ABC officials, who maintained they weren’t mortgaging their future when they expanded the quiz show to four nights a week to cash in fabulously in the short term, now have so many holes to plug it’s hard to know where to begin.

Admittedly, the network was riding high just a couple of years ago, and the ability of a single show, such as “Survivor” or “Millionaire,” to rapidly alter prime-time fortunes continues to stir hope of rising from the ashes; still, any rebirth must occur in the midst of an economic downturn that has hobbled advertiser-supported networks, with broadcasters (who don’t earn subscriber fees, as cable channels do) in particular feeling the pinch.

In a broader sense, one can argue that television has never fully recovered from its own bout with expansion during the 1990s, when the medium responded to a shifting regulatory environment with the addition of the WB and UPN networks as well as scads of cable interlopers. (The WB is partly owned by Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times.)

Suddenly, studios that could barely muster enough worthwhile programming to fill about 21/2 broadcast networks found themselves with six hungry mouths to feed. Heightened demand quickly obliterated the notion of bringing writing talent along slowly, as just about anybody who had told a joke on a studio lot was tapped to create and oversee a new program. In most instances, these newly anointed “show runners” wound up over their heads, as the number of prime-time sitcoms at one point swelled north of 60.

Beyond the talent crunch, new channels also sliced into the major networks’ share of the viewing pie. With so many options at our fingertips, broadcasters even discovered that their traditional strength--namely, reaching the widest possible audience without being confined by a singular identity--could actually become a liability versus channels like ESPN and Nickelodeon that narrowly targeted specific interests.

Contraction, from that perspective, could help alleviate some of the industry’s malaise. A little nipping and tucking, for example, would transform UPN and WB, which each possess pockets of strength, into a formidable merged entity called the WUP network. Imagine, no more fighting over “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but “Buffy” reunited with spinoff “Angel,” at the same time pairing the teenage Superman series “Smallville” and “Star Trek” spinoff “Enterprise.” You can almost hear the marketing gurus churning out teen-oriented promos like, “We’re gonna WUP you six nights a week!”

The irony is that as programmers labor to find compelling programs to fill a single network, many are simultaneously plotting how they can spread their offerings across two or more. Leading the parade is Disney, which not long ago paid more than $5 billion to acquire a cable channel being renamed ABC Family, motivated by a strategy that entails running and repeating ABC series, such as the new spy drama “Alias,” across the two networks.

In short, the studio’s rationale appears to be that people need multiple opportunities to watch programs that, at least based on how ABC is faring this fall, viewers chose to miss in the first place.

Granted, it’s easy to understand that networks would be drawn to economies of scale and the allure of programming two networks for the price of one, despite research indicating that new channels can lead to a kind of information overload. According to some studies, in fact, the number of channels a person watches with any regularity doesn’t appreciably rise as his menu of viewing options multiplies.

Fueled by greed and technology, however, the recent reality of the television business has been an explosion of new channels, as companies raced to capitalize on digital cable, satellite dishes, high-speed Internet access and other developments that widen the pipeline into the home, making room for a torrent of networks--some logical, others downright batty--aimed at every conceivable taste.

On its face, none of this would appear to be negative for viewers, who can easily ignore niche channels that don’t interest them and find the ones they want. Unfortunately, both the consumer and the networks do pay a price if the audience becomes so splintered, so diffused, that programmers can’t amass the sort of ratings weight necessary to justify producing attractive, high-cost programming such as the next “ER” or “The West Wing”--a legitimate concern, executives have warned, as summer reruns that once made the dramatic genre profitable (since networks pay for two showings of each episode) go increasingly ignored.

So is television’s inevitable future one of 200 networks garnering a 0.5 rating each--a day with 157 channels and nothing on? And in that context, is baseball’s solution really so extreme, or might broadcasters want to consider whether shrinking makes any sense for a business whose bubble, after years of unchecked expansion, might just be ready to burst?

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