Scheduling Is All in the Family

The television networks will set their fall prime-time lineups later this month, a ritual shrouded in mystery and even a touch of mythology. Small wonder that interest has grown in pulling back the curtain, exposing the great and powerful wizards who--through divination, focus group research and corporate back-scratching--decide what shows live, what shows die and which fans end up wailing about the injustice of it all on the Internet.

Unfortunately, these days much of the juicy, rough-and-tumble part of scheduling has been drummed out of the process.

Once a boisterous affair, with producers and studio executives passionately lobbying networks on behalf of programs, entertainment industry mergers have made those studios and networks siblings within the same corporate families. And while these step-kids might wrestle a bit with each other, ultimately a very few media barons serve as the arbiters of what gets on and stays on. So instead of a robust debate, the main gatekeepers engage in what has become little more than a high-stakes internal monologue.

Just consider ABC, which has 30 series prototypes, or pilots, as candidates for next season. Of those series hopefuls, 26 are produced either by or in conjunction with parent company Disney’s Touchstone Television.

Basically, then, when decision-making gets down to the nitty-gritty, Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner, as the guy with authority over ABC, will have a heart to heart with Michael Eisner, the guy who oversees Touchstone.

“Michael, I really need a show for Friday night,” he will say to himself, even if a few other people are in the room. “What do you have that would work for me?”

This is hardly a unique non-conversation. Across town, News Corp. President Peter Chernin, who supervises the Fox network and its sundry production units, will haggle with himself. CBS Television President Leslie Moonves, meanwhile, as the head of the network and its production arm, can make himself an offer he can’t refuse.

This wasn’t always so. Looking back a mere decade ago to the 1991-92 TV season--when “Law & Order” was still a baby and hadn’t yet started to multiply--the Big Three networks produced or co-produced fewer than a fifth of their programs, while half came from major studios and 31% were produced by independent companies.

In 1993, the government phased out rules limiting how much of their own programming the networks could supply. That action was the starter’s pistol for a series of mega-deals shifting the TV world on its axis and leaving a handful of major players standing.

Flash forward to the current season, which began with the four leading networks providing on average nearly two-thirds of their programs. By contrast, productions wholly owned by independents accounted for only about 10% of their lineups, and many of those fall into the category of low-cost unscripted fare.

At an industry forum last week, network executives played coy when asked how much of their lineups they would ideally like to own, joking that they would prefer to control all the hits and none of the clunkers. Yet the underlying point is that you only stumble upon hits by taking stab after stab, and it takes only one home-grown smash like “Will & Grace” or “Everybody Loves Raymond” to pay for plenty of also-rans.

From a viewer’s perspective, the obvious question is what effect this has on the finished product and whether the shows that make the cut are any worse. Arguably, the answer is no.

The effect, however, is more subtle than that. Will executives at Disney really take on ABC to do what’s best on behalf of a series? Are concepts that might fit better on one network directed to another because corporate synergy, rather than creative sense, dictates that be so? Do unconventional voices get stifled by a funneling process that provides executives greater incentive to please their bosses than champion a risky or unorthodox project?

The Writers Guild of America raised such concerns in a filing earlier this year asking the Federal Communications Commission to reexamine the rules that were eliminated in 1993, saying deregulation has “caused creativity to suffer.” The guild doesn’t have any more chance of succeeding than a high school basketball team does of beating the Lakers, but one has to admire the willingness to tilt at windmills when the phrase “You’ll never work in this town again” is more than just a cliche.

Writer-producer Diane English, whose “Murphy Brown” was one of the pillars of the 1991-92 season, suggests the TV industry’s current configuration does lead to shows being steered to a network for the wrong reason--namely, dollars and cents, as opposed to compatibility--thus sealing their doom. That can be painful for writers, she said, who want to decide “where this show that’s your baby would best be served.”

As for the quality issue, English noted, “You don’t know what you’re not seeing.”

Talk about a phantom menace, which illustrates why the issues here remain so confounding to the public, which has a hard time comprehending, much less getting riled up about, what they’re not seeing. Just as the media (mostly owned by those same conglomerates, by the way) are hard-pressed to lay bare how decisions are made at ABC, for example, when by all accounts much of the debate takes place between Eisner’s ears.

This isn’t to say that there’s no mythology left to un-shroud about how the TV business operates. No one, for example, has ever identified the mysterious ingredient that turns series pilots to junk (executives use a somewhat more emphatic term) between the time they are screened by the networks in Los Angeles and presented to advertisers in New York. Programmers are fond of blaming this contamination on some airborne element that attacks TV shows during the cross-country flight.

That substance is undetectable, of course. But like so much in television these days, what you don’t see can tell you as much about what’s happening as what you do.

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