Never Mind ‘Branding,’ Just Find an Audience

It’s difficult to say what’s funnier: Fox, a network that cultivates an image of renegade irreverence, playing host tonight to a Barbra Streisand Valentine’s Day concert; or the fact that said special replaces “Temptation Island,” a program that proves people--young people who need TV exposure--are the shallowest people in the world.

What’s especially notable about this dichotomy is that all the broadcast networks--envious of cable channels such as ESPN, Lifetime and Nickelodeon--have talked incessantly about “branding” in recent years, a fancy way of saying they want to create an identity to help viewers find the programs they want.

A quick scan of the dial lately, however, suggests many programs being chosen don’t appear to reinforce a network’s particular “brand.” What’s on display, rather, is ample incongruity, with programmers seemingly endeavoring at times to be something their network is not.

To fit Fox’s “brand,” for example, the Streisand special should trot out 16 young lovelies in thong bikinis and determine if James Brolin could be enticed to trade in his spouse for one of them, followed by a live on-air marriage.

Fox has also acquired broadcast rights to “The Sound of Music,” which might require a short preamble explaining to the average “America’s Most Wanted” viewer exactly who the Nazis were and why they are considered bad people.

Yet Fox is hardly alone in this regard. After all, that was stodgy old CBS--the network whose median viewing age is 52, highest among the major networks--desperately trying to be hip with a Super Bowl halftime show from sister Viacom network MTV featuring those whippersnappers Aerosmith and Britney Spears. You could almost hear the gasps across America: “Doris, just look at what that young girl is wearing!”

In similar fashion, CBS has tried with marginal success to lure younger viewers watching “Survivor” to sample its more conventional sitcoms and dramas, discovering that the one sure-fire attraction for wooing young adults to CBS, so far, is more “Survivor.”

Though CBS possesses the oldest audience profile of the major networks, ABC could be destined to wrest away that title. Once identified with family-oriented sitcoms (remember “Home Improvement,” “Full House” and “Family Matters”?), ABC is looking a bit paunchy thanks to aging demographics for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and seems schizophrenic in terms of programming philosophy.

This week, ABC put on “These Old Broads,” a made-for-TV movie that had “CBS Sunday Movie” written all over it, with Shirley MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds, Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor playing actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals. While it’s always welcome to see older performers on youth-obsessed networks, given ABC’s stated emphasis on reaching adults in the under-50 age bracket sought by advertisers, was “These Old Broads” really the best title they could find?

ABC also abandoned its venerable “TGIF” franchise this season--a block of Friday-night comedies popular with teenagers--and has since strayed all over the map thematically with its sitcoms. Entries premiering in March, for example, are “The Job,” a dark half-hour starring comic Denis Leary as a philandering, pill-popping cop; “What About Joan?,” built around movie second banana Joan Cusack; and “My Wife and Kids,” a sprightly family vehicle for Damon Wayans that’s conceptually much like “The Hughleys,” a show ABC canceled that later landed at UPN.

NBC, for its part, goes the retro route in March with its twice-postponed Kennedy miniseries “The Women of Camelot,” a project that would seem poorly suited to the network even if CBS hadn’t already struck out with “Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis,” which nearly had almost as many names as viewers. And does a network that revels in its association with quality--the home of Emmy winners “The West Wing,” “ER” and “Frasier”--really want to dive head first into the murkiest regions of unscripted programming with “Fear Factor,” a series from the Dutch producer of “Big Brother” that presents ordinary people facing phobias in pursuit of cash?

*

The answer, when all’s said and done, is maybe so. Maybe broadcasters--assuming they still possess a commitment to that designation--must look high and low in pursuit of viewers, offering a wide assortment of programs that occasionally repel some folks they usually attract. Maybe Fox can be the home of “The Simpsons” and an increasingly humor-starved “The X-Files” one night, the whimsical “Ally McBeal” the next and a mindless bikini catalog like “Temptation Island” on another.

Maybe people--with the exception of young children and some men, who gravitate to Nickelodeon and ESPN, respectively, as if they emitted homing beacons--really watch programs more than channels. And maybe all that discussion of branding by the major networks was mostly nonsense, a marketing gimmick they can’t adhere to in their frenzied quest for hits.

Indeed, the most consistent broadcast networks in terms of programming strategy are, not surprisingly, those reaching fewer people: the WB (part-owned by Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times), which can afford to focus on teenage girls and young women because it doesn’t carry the same overhead as NBC or CBS; and UPN, which takes its lead from “WWF Smackdown!,” catering to boys and young men who like seeing people hit with folding chairs. Still, even these channels veer from their core constituencies, with minimal overlap between UPN’s sitcom block, anchored by “Moesha” and “The Parkers,” and its signature drama, “Star Trek: Voyager.”

So networks can yammer on about branding, but their actions tacitly admit that people ultimately watch programs, not channels--a trend that promises to gain additional momentum as new technologies, among them video on demand and personal video recorders such as TiVo, allow people to select and set aside only those programs they choose to see.

Meanwhile, many “Temptation Island” viewers may feel a little shellshocked if they tune in tonight and encounter a middle-aged woman in a beaded gown crooning “They Way We Were.” Let’s just hope they don’t think she’s an “Island” temptress, or that sitting through the show is one of those immunity challenges from “Survivor.”

*

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