n Friday, May 3, 2001, the negotiating teams of the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers announced that they had reached an agreement on a new contract to replace the one that had expired the previous day, averting a strike that would have devastated the economy of Southern California and caused the fall 2001 television season to resemble the year 1994 in major league baseball history--you remember ... the one without a World Series. So the news said, in pretty much those exact words. (I used to write news copy for radio, so I can do it, too.)
Of course, the proposed settlement still has to be ratified by the 11,500 members of the Writers Guilds of America West and East. And there is still the important matter of a new contract between the Alliance and the Screen Actors Guild, which also expires soon. But informed observers (you
know who you are) expect the writers to vote their approval and the Alliance and SAG to negotiate a new deal patterned largely after the WGA's.
This makes me, personally, very happy. Since producers started stockpiling scripts last year, and quit buying this year, I feel as though I've already been on strike for all of Clarke's millennium. It will be nice for me (all right, and other writers, too) to know I can possibly sell something new, and not have to sell my house.
I have dodged a bullet.
Buffy Becomes a Budget Slayer
Lost in the news of the potential strike, and then its apparent settlement, was the rumor that Dark Angel star Jessica Alba is engaged to her co-star, Michael Weatherly. (See what happens when you ship people to Vancouver for long periods of time?)
Or that Virginia Hey, "Zhaan" of Farscape, is leaving the show, and we aren't quite sure if the show is coming back.
Oh, yes, and the titanic shift of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from WB to UPN.
The issue here (and possibly with Miss Hey) was money. At this stage of the lifetime of a show like Buffy, everyone in the cast and the behind-the-scenes writers and producers (also known as the "above-the-line" folks), and let's not forget the studio (Twentieth Television), is making more of it. It's not as if they're producing more television, however: yes, Buffy begat Angel, but unlike the good old days of Saturday-morning network television, when a hit like the Smurfs would go from a half hour to an hour to, at one point, 90 minutes of blue goo, Buffy remains a one-hour show.
And, much as I like it, it is a mature series, with its greatest period of growth behind it. So the cool, calculating intelligences at the WB, seeing increased cost and flat revenue, and (it is also reported), looking at their first profitable year ever, decided to cut Buffy loose.
Only to see her and her friends land at UPN, at a license fee of $2.3 million per episode, a substantial raise over its earlier figure. Now, given UPN's meager audience levels, this is a bit like sending every viewer a dollar every time the show airs. There's no way this deal is profitable for UPN (part of the Viacom empire) by itself.
Nevertheless, it makes a different kind of sense for UPN. They have lost Star Trek: Voyager, the anchor of their prime-time drama schedule, and don't know exactly when the new Trek will be available. So bolting a popular, well-regarded, recognizable show into the middle of their week makes more sense than launching another in UPN's endless series of two-episodes-and-goodbye experiments. You can count on Buffy to find some viewers; you can promote your other shows during Buffy; you can even expect to see a bump in the viewership of whatever show leads into or out of Buffy's timeslot.
There remains, of course, the larger question of whether Buffy, which skews young, as they say, and female--basically to the same audience that watches Felicity and The Gilmore Girls--will appeal to the same group of slightly older males that watches Voyager and WWF's Smackdown. My first guess is yes. My second guess is, given those UPN audience levels the past few years, who'd notice if they didn't?
UPN might even make up for the money they will certainly lose on the Buffy deal. If Buffy's yet-unknown lead-in catches on, this will look like brilliant programming.
No, WB, Twentieth TV and UPN all make out big on this. Who loses? Well, Buffy fans, for one.
Slayer Fans Could Find UPN M.I.A.
One of my earlier columns was titled "You do not control the delivery system," and in it I discussed certain realities of mass-market entertainment--that is, network television--that are often
forgotten in this world of internet, DVDs and cable. Which is this: most of the shows we love, from X-Files to Buffy to Trek, are still delivered to us by individual television stations that are part of larger conglomerates known as networks.
The two oldest networks, CBS and NBC, for years had the best station groups--those with the lowest channel numbers. In broadcast terms, lower numbers mean better signal coverage and thus larger audiences.
Some years back, ABC, riding high on a number of hits, staged a guerrilla raid on NBC's affiliate stations and got many of them to switch. FBC came along a bit after this, and was stuck with a lot of Channel 11 affiliates, or higher (what used to be known as UHF) stations like 18 or 25.
The WB was cobbled together out of independent stations, and so was UPN. As the runt of the litter (and here, for once, I'm speaking chronologically), UPN got stuck, in most cases, with stations that had the worst signals or, even more frightening, was shut out of some metro areas completely.
Which means that you might not find Buffy airing on your local UPN affiliate on Tuesday night--you might not have a local UPN affiliate. Buffy might be airing on Saturday afternoon between Earth: The Final Conflict and V.I.P. Or at 2 a.m.
But you can learn to program your digital VCR. And since Viacom seems committed to keeping UPN alive and even helping it prosper, you can count on seeing some better timeslots and possibly some station shifts by and by.
At least the show lives on. So be happy, fans.
I am. The sun is shining. I can put away my picket-walking shoes and my "Producers Unfair!" sign, and go to work on my next script.
Michael Cassutt's new novel, Red Moon, is currently available from Forge; a new short story, "Beyond the End of Time," will be posted on Scifi.com's Sci-Fiction site in June. He is writing a pilot for Nickleodeon..
