With New Shows, Network Patience Is a Lost Virtue

Remember "Emily's Reasons Why Not"? Of course you don't. So few people watched the ABC sitcom's debut last season, despite heavy promotion and Heather Graham's sex appeal, that the show achieved a distinction shared by only a dozen or so series in network history:

It was canceled after one episode.

Although a program can't get the ax sooner than that -- there's no record, after all, of a series being canceled during its first broadcast -- "Emily's" instant disappearance put it at the bleeding edge of a network trend. A decade or so ago, a new network series might get a dozen episodes to find an audience. Now the end tends to come quicker -- often much quicker. (During the 1995-96 season, 39 series were canceled before they aired more than 10 times; last season, 61 were spiked before they attained that modest milestone.)

If recent history is any guide, about half of the 26 new shows that will appear for the first time this fall on the major broadcast networks will appear for the last time this fall. They will be vaporized just like last season's short-lived losers, such as "Emily," "Head Cases" (which Fox ran twice before pulling), NBC's "Inconceivable" (two episodes) or CBS's "Love Monkey" (three on CBS, before the show expired on VH1).

Network executives say that each cancellation represents a small failure -- because each new show is a multimillion-dollar investment of production and promotion -- but they also say that excessive patience is frequently futile. Given the number of programs available to viewers, they say, a show that isn't attracting viewers its first few times out faces longer odds of ever being "discovered" several more weeks into its run.

"There are so many choices out there now," says Kelly Kahl, CBS's head of scheduling. "You just can't afford to stick with something that's not working for too long."

Increasingly, he says, the debut of a network series is like opening night on Broadway or the first weekend of a feature film's release: "Frankly, there will be some shows that just won't open," he says.

Part of broadcast TV's shortening attention span is a story of technology. These days, programmers have ever more sophisticated tools to detect what's working and what isn't.

The networks have long known how many viewers a show has, but advertisers have long wanted to know who those people are. In 1999, Nielsen, the ratings company, introduced a software system called Npower that enables the networks to analyze the income, education, race or ethnicity, and location of sample audiences. The system also shows where a target audience (say, women age 18-34) is going after one show ends and another begins -- a process known as "audience flow."

Armed with such data, a network can determine rapidly when to schedule a program relative to its other shows (or relative to another network's programs) to increase the desired flow. That kind of analysis used to take weeks, as viewers settled into predictable patterns; now it takes a few days after an episode airs, according to Nielsen.

The software "will allow [a programmer] to look, minute by minute, at how a viewer watched television that night with a full analysis of the demographics of that viewer," says Karen Watson, a Nielsen spokeswoman.

Then, as shows that aren't attracting the desired viewer get pink-slipped quickly, the holes often are plugged with reality shows, which are cheaper than dramas or sitcoms and can be produced quickly.