New York Loses Some Starring Roles

Don Scardino is a highly regarded TV director and producer, and Glenn Gordon Caron is one of TV’s best-known creators. Besides TV, both share something in common: an insistence on working in New York.

Lately though, they’ve shared something else too: not working in New York.

This, they say, is by choice. Scardino, a co-executive producer of “The Education of Max Bickford,” says, “I’m trying not to book myself up too much” because he’s developing some features. Caron (“Now and Again”) plans to go to Los Angeles next month to pitch the networks on new projects.

Caron most recently produced a show for Fox, which never aired. CBS pulled “Bickford” after one season. In New York’s white-hot TV production world of the past few years, another show would have quickly replace those. But New York’s TV production world isn’t white-hot anymore, and--depending on who’s doing the talking--it has either entered a deep freeze or a temporary lull. Caron and Scardino subscribe to the “lull” theory.

“The construction of new studio space makes me think it’s a blip,” says Scardino, referring to a spate of new or proposed studio space around the city. Caron says, “I believe six months from now, a number of shows will be shot in New York.”

Indisputably, New York television has hit a rough patch, and one need look no further than the fall 2002 schedules to see how rough. For the first time since the 1998 season, not a single new show produced in one of the five boroughs will be on the fall lineups of ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox. “Queens Supreme,” a 12-episode midseason order starring Oliver Platt for CBS, begins shooting in Queens next month. After that, the networks have ordered nothing for the foreseeable future.

Reasons? That’s the question of the moment in the $1.4-billion New York TV industry, and everyone who writes a script or hauls equipment or operates a camera has a theory.

“A lot of people are trying to look for reasons, [but] I don’t think there is a reason,” says Alan Suna, chief executive of Silvercup, New York’s biggest TV production facility, who adds that TV “is a little off, not a lot off.” He says, “I don’t think there is an anti-New York or Sept. 11 thing, as best as I can figure. It was just the luck of the draw.”

Without question, luck has played a role in New York’s current fallow period. If shows such as “Bickford” or ABC’s “The Job” had good ratings last year, they’d be back. If NBC had fallen in love with a new Chevy Chase sitcom, yet another New York show would be on the fall lineup.

“We lost two series and we got ‘Queens,’ ” says Patricia Reed Scott, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. “You can’t agonize over this. Shows drop off all the time.”

Indeed, two “Law & Orders” (the mother show and “Criminal Intent”) are produced in Manhattan (“SVU” is shot partly in New Jersey, and the series “Ed” entirely there). “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” are resoundingly New York shows, while director Mike Nichols is currently shooting “Angels in America” for HBO at Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens. NBC’s “Third Watch” remains a New York stalwart too.

Moreover, some say New York’s TV scene had a production version of a “false-positive” in 2000-01, when shooting here surged because of the fear of a writers’ strike. When the threat of a strike waned, so did production.

Nevertheless, most observers agree that money, and to a lesser degree Sept. 11, have clouded New York production. Unless associated with hits such as “ER,” producers on both coasts are now routinely told to bring an hour drama under budget, and New York remains burdened with an impression that it is an expensive city.

A show gets shot in New York because the city “is so organic” that “no other city could potentially act as a double, or because the star demands that it is in New York,” says one studio executive. “This year, for whatever reason, none of those situations happened.”

Verne Gay writes about television for Newsday, a Tribune company.