Decisions on the future of Fox dino drama “Terra Nova,” doc drama “House,” paranormal drama “Fringe,” sitcom “I Hate My Teenage Daughter” and even “X Factor” host Steve Jones are just around the corner, Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly came to Winter TV Press Tour 2012 on Sunday to reveal.
On the bright side, Reilly screwed up his courage to announce the end of animated comedy “Allen Gregory.”
“It’s hard to imagine the network without ‘House,’ ” Reilly told TV critics, who’d come with a laundry list of on-the-fence Fox shows their readers wanted to know about. On the other hand, Reilly admitted that “House” squeaked through to get on the schedule this season, given its skyrocketing costs and declining ratings.
Steven Spielberg’s super-pricey freshman series “Terra Nova” “looked fantastic” but “creatively, it was hunting” all season, Reilly acknowledged. But, he insisted, “We made money — the studio made money” on the show. Interpretation: They’re trying to figure out a way to do the show for a lot less money. Anyway, Reilly said they won’t be able to drag their feet much longer on a decision, given the lead time needed for the show’s special effects.
Simon Cowell is still off somewhere “decompressing” after the strain of doing “X Factor’s” first U.S. season. But the minute Simon returns, he will begin to “tweak” the singing competition, in answer to one critic’s questions as to whether Reilly had noticed that “America wants to vote off the host and one of the judges.” That would be, in order, Steve Jones and Nicole Scherzinger.
Asked whether he was happy with the show’s ratings — it attracted about half as many viewers as Cowell had promised to deliver — Reilly began to boast that the show helped Fox improve its fall ratings by 14 percent compared with last year, when Fox’s next big thing was “Lone Star,” remember? Where we come from, that’s called “damning with faint praise.”
Reilly claimed he did not know what “tweaks” Cowell had in mind for “X Factor,” but it’s a safe bet that a new host is one of them, given that Reilly said the big takeaway from the show’s first season is that hosting these live competition shows is harder than it looks and that Ryan Seacrest is a genius. At one point, Reilly said: “Whether Steve’s the guy or not.” Bye-bye, Steve Jones!
“We certainly want to keep him — it’s a deal issue,” Reilly said of contract-renewal talks with “American Idol” host Seacrest. He went so far as to reveal that it’s a “tough negotiation” and that its conclusion is . . . right around the corner.
Speaking of “Idol,” Reilly took a break from all these hard questions to deliver his annual “I expect ‘Idol’ will be down this season, but mostly it’s due to the fact it’s a [fill in the age]-year-old show.”
Duly noted.
How about that billion dollars the broadcast networks will be forking over to the NFL for football game broadcasts? At what point does football just become too expensive, one TV critic asked Reilly.
“It’s very hard to imagine the network without the NFL,” Reilly said. Fox is making money, he said. Not necessarily on football — he just threw that out there, adding, “We don’t break out the cost of any individual product.”
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