‘Desperate’ Delivers a Promising Start

“Desperate Housewives” might be the perfect tonic for desperate ABC network executives.

More than 21 million viewers tuned in Sunday night for the premiere of the Walt Disney Co.-owned network’s twisted take on a suburban neighborhood, exceeding the company’s expectations and pulling in its biggest audience for a drama series launch in a decade.

ABC, which was the top-rated network when Disney decided to buy it in 1995, has recently been languishing in fourth place. But this season it has started strong. The success of “Desperate Housewives” -- an hourlong drama whose narrator is a woman who has committed suicide under mysterious circumstances -- comes on the heels of another strong premiere: the Wednesday drama “Lost.”

“ABC needed a show that people would talk about,” said Shari Anne Brill, director of programming for the advertising-buying firm Carat USA. “Now they have two very distinctive shows that aren’t found on any other network.”

The network’s promising start couldn’t have come at a better time for Disney President Robert Iger. The longtime ABC chief is the only internal candidate in the running to succeed Chief Executive Michael Eisner, who will retire in September 2006. Disney board members have vowed to name Eisner’s replacement by June, not long after the current TV season wraps up. Analysts and investors say Iger’s chances at winning the top job are inextricably tied to the fortunes of ABC.

In addition to “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” ABC executives have been buoyed by strong ratings for other high-profile shows. They include “Wife Swap,” a so-called reality show on Wednesday nights in which families exchange mothers for two weeks, and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” the Sunday night show that every week renovates a house. For the last two weeks, more than 15 million viewers have watched “Lost,” which chronicles plane crash survivors stranded on a tropical island being chased by monsters. The network’s stalwart “Monday Night Football” has also produced solid numbers.

“So far, so good,” Iger said last week at a Merrill Lynch investment conference. Apparently confident enough to try a little self-deprecating humor, he added, “You have to wonder ... about a network that puts ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ on its schedule at the same time.”

Iger has learned from experience not to celebrate too soon. Two years ago, ABC’s encouraging fall ratings dwindled in January after the football season ended and Fox Broadcasting Co. introduced its hit “American Idol.”

Now, just three weeks into the season, other new ABC shows such as “The Benefactor,” with Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban, and the comedy “Complete Savages” have failed to excite viewers.

NBC and Fox also have had mixed success launching new offerings. CBS, meanwhile, has made gains with shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and its two spinoffs.

“It’s premature to declare victory [for ABC], but it’s not too early to declare that progress is being made,” said Tom Wolzien, media analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Turning around the struggling network has long been a top priority for Eisner and Iger. Five years ago, the network was riding high on the success of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” but Disney executives quickly exhausted the show’s appeal by running it four nights a week. Since then, ABC, which has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has struggled to reverse its sliding fortunes.

To the extent that ABC’s luck is changing, though, credit is due at least in part to an increased willingness to take risks. When Stephen McPherson became ABC’s president of prime-time entertainment in April, he quickly moved to schedule and market the shows he’d inherited to maximum advantage. On Monday, advertisers said the approach was paying off.

“These are not traditional shows for ABC,” said Stacey Lynn Koerner, an executive vice president of ad-buying firm Initiative. “They’re not family comedies. But ABC tried the tried-and-true, and that didn’t work. When you’re so far behind, you have to go out on a limb, and that’s what ABC did.”

ABC also honed its promotions to build buzz. Instead of cutting several on-air promos, as they’ve done in previous seasons, ABC marketers identified a single theme for each show, then ran with it. “Desperate Housewives,” for example, was sold with the tag line “Everybody has a little dirty laundry.”

That strategy freed up money for ABC to buy ads in other media -- in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet and the radio. ABC bought space on billboards for the first time in five years and experimented with clever stunts to build viewer interest. The network hired crews over the Labor Day weekend to litter beaches on the East and West coasts with plastic bottles to promote “Lost.” Inside the bottle was this message: “Help, I’m Lost. You can find me on ABC on Sept. 22.” (ABC also hired cleanup crews to retrieve leftover bottles.)

The success of “Desperate Housewives” was particularly sweet for McPherson, who bought it as a speculative script when he was head of Disney’s Touchstone Television studio. McPherson had known the writer, Marc Cherry, since the early ‘90s, when both men worked at the production company that made the hit series “The Golden Girls.” McPherson was a just a gofer then, while Cherry was writing scripts.

Years later, McPherson read Cherry’s “Desperate Housewives” script and “flipped for it,” he said. Now that viewers seem to be flipping for it too, McPherson said, everyone at ABC should take heart. His bosses did -- McPherson heard from both Iger and Eisner on Monday.

“They were really pleased,” he said. “Hopefully, the people here [at ABC] will start to believe in themselves and get that energy in their guts and believe that they compete.”

Some analysts had worried that the network’s audience was getting so thin that it would be unable to get traction for its most deserving shows. But that hasn’t been the case.

“It’s really nice to see a little taste of success,” McPherson said. “But this doesn’t change our perspective. We know it’s a long road: This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Times staff writer Richard Verrier contributed to this report.