Now, focus turns to closings

TV premiere week is heading into its final few days. Let the death watch begin.

For viewers, the launch of the fall TV season holds the promise of exciting new programs to be discovered and stars to be born. But for network and studio executives, the next few weeks are more about managing failure.

That’s because the results of a year’s worth of casting, scripting and scheduling all comes down to a few crammed weeks and a bald reality that fewer than 20% of the season’s 38 new shows are likely to see a second season. Unfortunately, figuring out in advance which shows will work and which won’t is a guessing game at best.

So executives are waking up extra early these days to await the buzz of their BlackBerrys with the “overnights” -- the preliminary ratings results of the previous night’s programs -- at about 5:30 a.m., an early indicator for executives of whether they will have a good day ahead.

Once in the office, they are poring through reams of more data to analyze trends upward (or downward) and specific demographics -- shows attracting the affluent young adults advertisers crave get extra consideration from networks, even if their overall viewership is only so-so. Sometimes, however, “you just know” if a show is worth dropping, says NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker.

Making sense of the numbers can be stomach-churning. Take the example of NBC’s “Whoopi.”

The Tuesday night comedy has been on the air only three weeks and already its perceived fortunes have taken a roller-coaster ride. In midsummer, it topped many lists of the first show likely to be canceled, as advertising executives and some critics panned its edgy humor about such politically incorrect topics as interracial dating and Middle Eastern stereotypes. While NBC says the ad time on “Whoopi” sold out, ad agency Carat USA called “Whoopi” and its companion “Happy Family” “Must Flee TV.”

So NBC gave it an early start and reran the episodes -- the pilot has aired three times already -- to ensure viewers got to check it out. They tuned in sufficiently -- 15.1 million viewers the first night -- that they set off speculation that maybe the show wasn’t so doomed after all.

Then came the sudden death of John Ritter, star of ABC’s “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter,” a modest hit that runs opposite “Whoopi.” The NBC show’s potential soared as it appeared that ABC would cancel “8 Simple Rules.” But ABC decided to keep its show in production, and the outlook for “Whoopi” dimmed considerably in the eyes of the official and unofficial oddsmakers. Tuesday, “8 Simple Rules” won its time period, while “Whoopi” fell to 8.9 million viewers, down 41% from its debut.

That no one really knows what will work and what won’t is a humbling fact to even the most savvy network executive. CBS Television Chairman and Chief Executive Leslie Moonves and his team were convinced three seasons ago that “The Fugitive” was their big show for fall, and they spent their promotional dollars accordingly, all but ignoring the lowly “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” which followed it on the schedule. “We thought maybe ‘CSI’ would hold onto 80% of the ‘Fugitive’ audience,” Moonves recalls. From week one, however, “CSI” outdrew it. “The Fugitive” was canceled and “CSI” went on to become the most-watched show on television.

Tempering the hype and managing expectations are key -- and getting harder in an entertainment-obsessed media culture. “The rush to judgment by the press is sometimes less than fun to deal with,” says Susan Lyne, ABC Entertainment president. “Everybody is a Monday morning quarterback and they want to keep score, and I think that the initial numbers can often be deceiving.” Reporters, she says, can puff up shows that “get one set of good numbers, and then audiences never go back to look at it a second or third week, or alternatively, they never look at a show” that opens poorly but gradually builds an audience base.

The sitcom “According to Jim,” she notes, has been written off by the press since it premiered in 2001, yet Tuesday night it beat NBC’s former powerhouse “Frasier” among the 18-to-49-year-olds who are the key target for advertisers.

The networks and studios themselves contribute to the hype, declaring shows a hit after a week when tune-in might have been driven merely by curiosity. “There’s a general mistrust generated on the part of the audience when every network is immediately declaring they have the new hit America’s talking about,” says WB President Jordan Levin.

“You don’t know anything after one week,” Moonves says. “The whole question mark is where is the show going to settle in.” Managing the unpredictability is made more difficult by the pressure to make snap decisions about throwing a show out. Increasingly, the model for TV has become the film business, Levin says, where “expectation shapes performance as much as performance itself.”

History teaches that quick decisions aren’t always the right ones. “Seinfeld” was a marginal show for a couple of seasons before becoming one of the most successful shows ever.

Network executives insist they are getting more patient. “I think the rules have changed dramatically in the last few years,” Lyne says. When there were four networks, she says, “If a show didn’t pop out of the gate, then the impulse was to take it off and try something else. Now, because it takes time for that huge television audience to find their way to a new show, to sample it and to decide whether to come back on a regular basis, you just have to be significantly more patient.”

The statistics bear that out, says Stacey Lynn Koerner, executive vice president overseeing research for the ad agency Initiative. Shows are lasting “slightly longer in recent years, because there’s much more network ownership of programs than there used to be and a financial incentive to try to give them a chance to succeed,” she says.

Advertisers, she notes, are less concerned about which new shows fail -- more than 80% of them do, she says -- than how returning series perform. Advertisers buy returning shows because they can pinpoint what the audience will be, and if those programs fail, then the ad buyers end up with an unknown show that replaces it. That was a problem last season when many networks quickly replaced failing programs with reality series, whose young adult audiences were often significantly different than the audiences the advertisers had been promised.

Despite talking about being patient, networks still on occasion pull the trigger quickly. Last season, ABC’s Friday sitcom “That Was Then” had the dubious distinction of being the first show canceled, after just two outings. Even the imprimatur of David E. Kelley couldn’t save Fox’s “Girls Club,” which was the second show canceled, also after two airings.

Among the shows that have or will get on the air, the guessing list of first-to-be-canceled includes a show from every network. Among the prime targets, including “Whoopi,” are UPN’s “The Mullets,” the WB’s “Run of the House,” Fox’s “Luis,” and ABC’s “Threat Matrix,” which premiered last week to a third place, against “Survivor” and a repeat of NBC’s “Friends.” Lyne said ABC was happy with the showing, noting the “shows they’ve delivered to us are really good” and a different audience sampled it on Sunday, when it got a second airing. More importantly, she says, “it’s arguably in the most competitive time period on the schedule, and it doesn’t have to do huge numbers for us to be successful.”

Likewise, Moonves dismisses speculation that Kelley’s “The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H.” at 10 p.m. Wednesdays will be short-lived, because of difficult “Law and Order” competition. The show premiered Wednesday with just more than 8 million viewers, a distant third in the time period.

The 10 p.m. period is particularly tough because affiliates with late local news and “Late Show” host David Letterman will clamor that their ratings are being hurt if the show does poorly.

But CBS’ expectations for “Brotherhood” are much less than for “Two and a Half Men,” which has a “big show runner, big star and big time period” Mondays after “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Moonves says.

Ditto for NBC’s “Coupling.” Dubbed by the press as the replacement to “Friends” and airing on NBC’s all-important Thursday, it has expectations thrust upon it that Zucker calls “totally unfair to the show,” adding that “our expectations are far more modest than the media’s.”

Advertisers and reporters and viewers can play a guessing game about shows, but network and studio executives also have the advantage of more information: They have seen the episodes that haven’t yet aired and the scripts that have been turned in.

So while industry consensus continues to build that “Whoopi” and “Happy Family,” won’t make it, Zucker says he remains “cautiously optimistic,” based on episodes to come, the strong track record of the shows’ staffs and the ratings among upscale viewers.

As for the viewers who will tune in to see Ritter’s final episodes on ABC, “We know that and we’re not going to be overly concerned about that,” he says.