hen you are a writer-producer on a sci-fi television show, you have a certain amount of power. (And isn't that the deep-rooted theme of every classic sci-fi story, from Stranger in a Strange Land to Dune to Star Wars? That you have power?)
You control the setting of the story, the characters, and the story.
Sometimes you even control the dialogue. You control the edit and the mix and the design (if not the execution) of the special effects.
You live for these moments of control--even for the moments when you feel you're in control, though really not. Because there's always something to suggest that you can't order the forces of nature. An actor breaking a leg or an actress announcing her pregnancy. Weather turning sour on your one day out of the studio. A camera that develops a problem and eats up a day's work. The network executive who likes your show being replaced by one who doesn't.
These are just some of the things you cannot control.
Then there is the transmission of your series. (For our purposes here, transmission will mean the same as delivery system.)
The Control Voice is right
This sounds a bit like the opening to both the classic and Showtime versions of Outer Limits. When the Control Voice says that "we control the transmission," he may have been right.
But you, the writer-producer or show runner, do not and never will.
And yet the way your show is transmitted determines whether it lives or dies.
On Monday, August 14, 2000, News Corp., the parent company for Twentieth Television and the Fox Broadcasting Network, announced that it had acquired the Chris Craft station group, 10 outlets in cities such as San Francisco that had formerly been part of the United Paramount Network.
United it falls
Some of you will remember UPN--the former Paramount Studios/Chris Craft joint venture (hence the "United") to create a mini-network or "weblet." It had its ups and downs, perhaps more downs than ups, until Chris Craft begged out, recently selling its share to Paramount/Viacom for $5 million after having sunk about a hundred times that into the project. Ouch.
UPN is best known to those of us in the sci-fi community because it airs Star
Trek: Voyager and Seven Days. Voyager has sailed through six seasons now,
generally averaging about a five share, or something on the order of 4 million viewers per airing. Seven Days, now in its third season, averaged
about a million fewer last time I looked.
These figures don't mean much, unless you happen to be in the programming or
financing end of the television business, but Millionaire or Survivor will
have gross audience numbers about five or six times as high.
Of course, for years the networks have been saying that it's better to have
the right 6 million people watching a show than the wrong 10 million. It's all about demographics, they say, and since, according to Harper's Magazine, September 2000, their ad revenue has risen by 46 percent
since 1991, while their overall audience has declined 24 percent, they may be
right.
The brutal truth
But the brutal truth is, the delivery system guarantees that you can't
have a hit on UPN--or PN, as it will temporarily be known. You don't have enough stations to reach enough available homes. This is what network people
call "coverage," and if you don't have it, even Survivor won't be a hit
for you.
I used to work on Seven Days, and the day after every new episode "aired" (and I use the term loosely) on UPN, we would look at the ratings and see that we had reached about 85 percent of the potential audience. And
when we looked further into the numbers, we found that, say, Houston ran the series on Saturday afternoon rather than Wednesday evening, further diminishing our already diminished audience.
Hell, if your series is going to be aired like that, why bother dealing with
a studio and a network? Sell the show directly to the stations as a syndicated offering. In success, you make more money. And the bar for failure is a little lower. Babylon-Five, throughout most of its honored
run in syndication, rarely reached more than a million viewers a week.
Nevertheless, given the controlled costs of the series and the needs of the various station groups which bought it, this was enough viewership for success. Enough to give it four good years.
The Crusade is over
When Joe Straczynski's follow-up, Crusade, aired on TNT, the bar was much
higher. And, consequently, no more Crusade.
The X-Files staggered along with relatively low ratings on Fox until it found
its audience, mid-way through its second season. Assuming The X-Files would
have been bought by a CBS in the first place, it never would have been allowed 30-plus episodes to become a hit. It would have been canceled in the first six.
Even today, according to SCIFI.COM's ratings chart, Buffy only got a 1.9
rating last week. Granted, this is a depressed summer re-run number, but it still seems small to this former network drone.
Cable series have their own delivery quirks, too. Those on premium networks
(that is, ones you pay extra for) may air twice in an evening, or several times a week. The ratings for each episode are less important in this universe than they are in "free" broadcasting, because the subscription fees are paying the freight.
SCI FI is something else
Cable nets like SCI FI Channel are something else again, since they are bundled with "free" network affiliates in your markets and with premium channels on local cable systems. They are advertiser-supported, but not directly affected by, say, the strength of a local broadcast signal.
(Ah, but they are affected by the efficiency of a local cable operator--and
how long did you have to wait for SCI FI to come your neighborhood, and how many times has that number changed since it did?)
Your time slot is another element in your series delivery system. I can't think of a specific sci-fi case, but when I worked at CBS many years ago, Simon and Simon was considered dead after half a dozen episodes had aired--until it was given one last chance and bracketed with the compatible hit, Magnum, P.I. Bingo, multi-year run.
Syndicated sci-fi series, as you may have noticed, are either slotted at 8
p.m. (7 p.m. Central and Mountain) week nights on independent stations, or on
Saturday afternoons. If you're a producer and you find your show airing at 11
p.m. Sunday night, be afraid.
So now News Corp. has a dozen new outlets for its programming. Fox shows like The X-Files already air in those markets, so these secondary stations
will be running other Fox-owned series, such as Fox Family offerings. What they won't be running--for long, no matter what Fox says--is UPN programming, which profits Viacom, also known as the enemy.
UPN's writer-producers have no say in this. Nor will NBC's when that network is sold, as it surely will be.
Trying to write about time travel or robots or life on other planets is tricky enough without constantly fearing loss of control.
Maybe it's better not to know.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a
number of SF and fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, two dozen science fiction short stories and, most recently, the forthcoming Red Moon (Forge, Jan. 2001).
