HERE'S AN UPFRONT BLAST FROM THE PAST

While you're all waiting for my next post on pilot testing (probably Monday) here's something from 2011 on scheduling strategy. It was a conversation between my pal Joe Adalian and me which appeared on the Vulture site.

How Does a Network Build a Fall Schedule? Fox’s Scheduling Chief Reveals the Strategies

By Josef Adalian Follow @TVMoJoe

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Today kicks off Upfront week, when all the focus in TV land is on the bevy of new shows the networks are ordering (and the old ones getting the hook). But true TV obsessives won't just be looking at the shows, they'll be scrutinizing when they're airing. It's all about the grids: Which new series are facing off against weaker holdovers, which big hits are being moved against each other — and will anyone finally put something good back on Saturday nights? Fact is, for all the talk that DVRs and Hulu have made schedules irrelevant in the modern TV era, the networks still take which shows go where very seriously. A decision to shift American Idol off of Tuesday nights could've cost Fox millions had it gone wrong; instead, it's helped the network finally become a player on Thursdays and made Bones an even bigger hit. So just how do these time slot chess moves get made? Vulture rang up someone who would know: Fox's head of scheduling, Preston Beckman, who has 30 years of grid-making experience. During his busiest and most critical season, we asked him to give us a peek into the process, letting us know just what goes into the crafting of a fall schedule. How much is commerce, how much is instinct, and how much is strategy?
Schedulers don't wait to get to work until they're handed a final roster of shows; rather, they're brought in early in the development process. Like all Fox senior execs, Beckman, a bearded and bespectacled New York native with a Ph.D. in sociology from NYU, gets looped into projects early on in their gestation; he reads a few scripts, mostly those his colleagues in programming indicate have promise. Beckman gives his input and begins imagining where these new shows might fit best, and he keeps tabs on how projects are progressing as they get picked up to pilot and filming starts. But the real work begins in early May, once all of the pilots have been filmed and suits from all over Fox (yes, including Rupert Murdoch) screen the contenders and decide what moves forward to series.
While he works most closely with Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly and Fox Networks Group chairman Peter Rice to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, there are other factions weighing in. "You have various interest groups," Beckman explains. "The people who put together the development, research, current programming, marketing, sales. All the constituencies are heard from." So with all these voices weighing in, what precisely determines which shows end up on the schedule, and where? In addition to the most obvious — which shows are likely to make the most money for a network — three big variables shape the final scheduling decisions, Beckman says:

The shape of the current season's lineup. "We need to put on shows that fill our [programming] needs," he says. "We don't want to have to blow up a schedule to get a show on the air." Translation: Just because a pilot turns out great doesn't automatically mean it gets slotted. A promising contender like Locke and Key, for example, might turn out great, but if execs believe they already have enough sci-fi, it won't move forward. (Indeed, all indications are that the project is dead, though Beckman and Fox suits weren't talking specifics about the schedule last week.)
Research. Networks like Fox shell out millions to study how viewers might react to a program, testing out each contender with focus groups. "Every year there are shows that test so well that we have to give them a second look or convince ourselves it's a false positive," Beckman says. "If you get a low-testing show, you shouldn't put it on. But if it's high-testing, you still need to drill down. There may be red lights, signs it's not as strong as it seems.”
Gut. Network brass often get painted as soulless number-crunchers who care only about ratings and bottom-line profits. But Beckman says that when it comes to scheduling, you can't discount "the passions of the people in the room. What will they fall on their swords for? There's always a show people fight for even though all the evidence suggests it won't work, and there's no place on the schedule for it … There are differences of opinion. But we talk it through." That's what happened a few years ago, with Glee.
When Fox was debating whether to green-light the musical show and, ultimately, how to schedule it, "some of us were skeptical," Beckman admits, counting himself in that category. But once the show got picked up, Beckman quickly became Team Glee: "It was, 'Okay, how do we get this to work?'" His idea: Temporarily shift So You Think You Can Dance from summer to fall so that Glee had a compatible lead-in when it premiered. The ploy worked; Glee has been a cornerstone of Fox's schedule the past two years. "You don't sabotage shows, even if your gut tells you it won't work."
Most schedulers, including Beckman, will tell you that the best prime-time schedule is one that features the least amount of change possible. While bold moves get lots of media attention, predictability is a scheduler's friend; fewer changes equal less viewer confusion and, often, better ratings. And yet, every so often, networks do have to make bold moves — either because too many shows have failed or because external factors demand it. Take one of the ballsiest switcheroos Beckman has engineered in his career: When he was at NBC in 1994, he moved Frasier from its comfy post-Seinfeld slot over to Tuesdays at 9, opposite the then-mighty Roseanne. At the time, Entertainment Weekly said the Peacock "must be nuts" for such a shift; Kelsey Grammer's agent at the time told the magazine that the actor refused to go to New York for upfronts because he was so pissed by the move.
So what was behind such a major roll of the dice? "That was under threat of death from our sales department," Beckman reveals. "We had planned to go with unscripted on Tuesdays, but someone in sales told me she'd kill me if we came to New York with that schedule." Back then, in the pre-Survivor era, "unscripted" meant shows like Unsolved Mysteries, which were far less attractive to advertisers. "I thought about it and thought about it, and then I woke up at 3 in the morning with the idea of putting Frasier on Tuesdays."
While much is often made of networks playing a giant game of chess with each other, moving shows to match their rivals' plays, Beckman says the best scheduling strategy is remaining focused on your own lineup. "The more you focus on yourself and the less you worry about others, the better off you are," he says. Which is easier to do when you go at the start of the week, right after NBC; then everyone has to react to you. "If we didn't go first, we'd react," he admits. "You try to out-think yourself, and it doesn't work."
However, Beckman does concede that adjusting to another network's schedule can pay off. Case in point: He says the decision to shift American Idol to a Wednesday-Thursday air pattern this January was partially a response to CBS's call last fall to replace Survivor with The Big Bang Theory on Thursdays. It was a great move by the Eye, turning BBT into an even bigger success; at the same time, it meant there was no longer an established reality show in that time slot for the first time in forever, and Fox claimed it for Idol. "You look around and all of a sudden your Spidey sense tingles and you say, 'Holy shit! Do they realize what they just did?' And hopefully they didn't," he says. "For them it was a bold move. For us it was opportunity."
Beckman is a realist when it comes to scheduling. He understands that the TV landscape has changed radically in the past decade, with DVRs and other time-shifting technologies making it much harder to play by the old rules. But, "It doesn't bum me out," he says. "I feel I've evolved along with the changes in viewing patterns. A lot of the things we've done take into account changes. Moving Fringe to Friday was probably the first scheduling move that took into account the delayed viewing of a show."
Then there's the fact that not everybody watches TV via DVR or downloads. "The majority of people still watch TV live," he says. "Scheduling still matters."

SETTING THE SCHEDULE - PILOT SCREENINGS

In early May 1989 I walked into my first pilot screening room. It was the conference room at NBC in Burbank. I was VP Audience Research and had come out to the west coast with my boss and a few other east coast executives. Brandon Tartikoff was President of Entertainment at the time. I had gotten to know Brandon over the prior few years and was involved in helping him put together some of his legendary marathon upfront presentations that would start in the morning after breakfast and run all the way to lunch.

I was really excited about this opportunity having been a TV addict my entire life and living out my dream of working in the television industry which, at that point was pretty much the three broadcast networks and an upstart FOX. Don Carswell, who was the CFO of NBC and my mentor, warned me that I would come home from this process somewhat disillusioned. He was right. I assumed that there was some strategy behind what pilots were being developed and that there was a sense of where the schedule was going moving forward. Neither was the case. We screened somewhere between twenty and thirty pilots and my head was spinning by the end. Two pilots did stand out and, although neither of them made the 1989-90 schedule, they did play a significant role in NBC’s success in the Must-See-TV 90’s: Seinfeld and Law&Order. Both had interesting origins.

Rick Ludwin, who was the head of our Specials and Late Night group, developed Seinfeld. In the screening room Rick sheepishly, almost apologetically, introduced the pilot. He had used money from his Specials budget to fund the pilot and wanted us to know it was “different” and he wasn’t sure if it was a television show. Low bar Rick. Many of us loved it, some did not including Brandon who did say that it was too Jewish and too New York. Fortunately we ordered four episodes and screened Seinfeld again in 1990.

Law&Order was screened on the final day of pilot screenings. It was developed at CBS and they had passed on it. I have written about L&O on the blog and how Brandon salvaged it from the reject pile. It was another show that did not make the Fall schedule and was redeveloped into a less gritty version of the original CBS pilot. It was also rescreened again a year later and made the 90-91 schedule. Fortunately, for me, by the time I became head of scheduling in the summer of 1991 these two important pieces were in my quiver.

Back to the screening room. If my memory serves me there were about thirty to forty people in the room. There were the programming executives, two or three Sales execs, our CFO (Don), our head of Business Affairs (John Agoglia who would be an important ally over most of my years in scheduling at NBC), heads of Marketing, the head of Casting, our top Press and Publicity people and Bob Wright the head of NBC. We started screening on a Monday morning and continued all week and into the weekend. We screened pilots in the morning and into the night. By the end I had no idea what I had just screened but it was clear that a lot of these pilots were done because of favors or commitments. I also started to learn that a lot of the time slots on the schedule were “promised” to studios in order to make better deals for existing hit shows. These were valuable lessons that stayed with me through my career.

The screening process stayed the same over the next few years but at some point we started to include more people until the conference room was packed and, as you would assume, with more people came less honest discussion of the pilots. It came to a head one year when there was one dominant voice in the room and, rather than screenings being an occasion to come together as a group, everyone was leaving the room demoralized.

My boss, Warren Littlefield, was concerned and asked if I could figure out an alternative to the group screening process. I told him that we could either go back to a smaller group which could stand up to a dominant voice or we can do something different. I thought about how people watch TV in the real world and I recommended screening in small groups all over the building.  We would replicate a “family” environment where everyone could be comfortable expressing their opinions. I also suggested that we would make these groups diverse by populating them with people from as many different departments as possible; and we would try to put people from different management levels together. Finally, I felt that it would give us a different read on the pilots. Would the groups come back with the same reaction to a pilot or would we find that the response would differ among the groups?

The small group screening process worked and continued at NBC for a few years beyond my tenure at the Peacock. At FOX we instituted a similar process which remained through the remainder of my tenure. At FOX we would screen the pilots in offices rather than conference rooms. Each group would have a host who was a senior “adult” executive who would moderate the group and send the feedback to the top executives. The most Senior Executives, Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch etc. would rotate among the groups. This process resulted in great feedback on the pilots and a real sense of inclusiveness by the FOX employees. We also set up screenings for those not included in the groups. One year a decision was made to go back to a larger group and bring in professional moderators. It was a disaster and we returned to the small group format.

The fun part of the group screening for me was the way we assigned people to the groups. Kathy Farrell (my assistant through my entire scheduling career), Anne Schwarz (who organized the screenings) and I would randomly pick names out of a hat and assign them to whatever group was next on the list. We would make sure that there was never more than one development exec in a group and that every division was represented. We also made sure that the “problem” participants (those who like to hear themselves talk and tried to dominate the conversation) were assigned to a group with a strong leader who could manage them. We would always wind up with some interesting combinations. I would also learn a lot about the social dynamics at FOX as several execs would stop by and demand to be moved out of a group for personal reasons. Fun times.

As I mentioned in a prior post, I spent the last few years of pilot screening viewing with the junior execs and the assistants who had formed a “Script Club”. I wanted to hear from the younger people at the company and it gave me an opportunity to put the pilots in the context of what our needs were and how it would fit on the schedule. The only thing I asked in return was that they keep whatever was said in the room in the room. Although I am sure that was not the case with all I do believe most of them adhered to that deal. After we set the schedule and returned form the upfront in New York City I would treat the Script Club to pizza and go over what happened in the scheduling room and why the schedule came out as it did. I hope I gave them some perspective. By now most of these kids are all over the business. Hopefully they are putting some of what they learned into action.

At both networks I would let the development execs chose which pilots we were going to screen each day, and in what order we would screen them. They had worked really hard on all these shows and, although I didn’t think it would matter, I felt that they had earned the right to try to ‘influence” the people in the room by the screening order. I often saw this backfire. One year at FOX, on the first day of screening, drama and comedy colluded with comedy hoping to bury a pilot by putting it after drama’s most promising pilot. Well that most promising drama pilot bombed in all the groups screening while everyone was so relieved to see a promising comedy pilot follow it. Oops.

Since we made so many pilots at NBC I would ask the leaders of the two development teams to select a pilot that they felt was so terrible that they didn’t want us to screen it. One year the head of one of the development teams selected a drama that had come in on the transom (was not developed internally) called “The Pretender”. Warren Littlefield had passed it around to some of us when it arrived in the building. It met with a lot of enthusiasm by John Miller as well as Vince Manze in marketing and me. As some of you know, “The Pretender” was about a dude who was on the run from The Center, which took in child prodigies who could assume any identity. It was sort of a sci-fi version of “The Fugitive” and, like “The Fugitive” it was a unique way to do an anthology series.  “Quantum Leap” was another example…. but I digress.

So we don’t screen “The Pretender”. John Miller came into my office and asked why and I told him that it was one of two pilots development chose not to screen. He asked if I had watched it. I had not. We test all the pilots and, because ”The Pretender” was considered a non-starter it was held as one of the last pilots tested. The morning that we were finalizing the schedule I received an email from Eric Cardinal our head of research. I will never forget the subject line: PRETENDER ALERT! Eric sent the email just to me to say that “The Pretender” was the highest testing pilot we had seen since “ER” which was the gold standard. It may have tested higher. He wanted to know what he wanted me to do since we had not screened it. I first went to the exec that had told me not to screen it and I told him I needed to tell Warren Littlefield. He said OK but could we test it again.

We called everyone together and screened “The Pretender”. It was well received. The testing came back as strong as the original test and we suddenly had put together a Saturday night of “Dark Skies”, “The Pretender” and “Profiler” the last two spent a few years on Saturday nights. Moral of the story: Who the fuck really knows. It’s all a crapshoot.

I estimate that over 27 years of screening pilots I have seen between 450 and 500 pilots. I can think of only a few that made the schedule because of the response in the screening rooms. That doesn’t mean that the rooms didn’t embrace several successful shows but that these pilots were “discovered” in the screening room. You could feel the excitement after the screenings. If they share any characteristic, they were different. Here’s my list:

·      SEINFELD

·      FREAKS AND GEEKS

·      I’LL FLY AWAY

·      FRIENDS

·      24

·      ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

·      GLEE

“Freaks and Geeks” was the biggest surprise among this group and had the added factor of being screened right after Columbine. There was a lot of discussion over whether this was a show that we should put on our schedule given the then recent events. We felt it was too good to keep off but since we never expected it to make the schedule we “buried” it on Saturday night at 8. I remember a few days before it premiered we started to get the reviews and they were wildly enthusiastic. None of us expected that response and by the time we moved it to Monday night it was too late to save the show. That was the first Judd Apatow show that I scheduled. The second was “Undeclared” a college comedy for FOX. That one was scheduled after “That 70’s Show” and led into one of Mike Darnell’s extravaganzas “Love Cruise” (or as we called it internally “Fuck Boat”). Good slot. Didn’t work. A few years after that Apatow actually singled me out as the person who ruined his television career. I never got the thank you.

Over the years you hear so many things in the screening rooms that would make your head spin. Out of respect for all involved I will keep them in the vault. I will leave you with my all time favorite uttered by someone who left us recently. Pierson Mapes was our bigger than life, hard living head of affiliate relations during a large part of my time at NBC. Pier coined the phrase “You scratched the surface deeply” which has lived in my head for over twenty-five years. Back in 1991 (at the very start of my tenure as head of scheduling at NBC) we screened a pilot called “Reasonable Doubts”. It starred Marlee Matlin as an Assistant DA and Mark Harmon as an investigator assigned to her. As you are well aware Marlee Matlin is a hearing impaired actress. After we screened the pilot and the lights came up in the screening room Pier started the discussion by saying “I really liked it but did she have to be deaf?”

Yup.

THE BOOK OF LIFE - PART 18 THE YIZKOR EDITION

Well it’s time for more entries in The Book of Life and I thought I would be efficient with this post and lump a bunch of network shows into one Yizkor Service. You see we’re at that time of the year where the networks start emptying their shelves of stuff they ordered for all the wrong reasons. These shows sneak on the schedule and I believe network executives secretly hope that no one notices them so that they can get on with their lives. Several times over the past few weeks I have said to myself “What the fuck was that?” Then I remember “Oh yeah, I screened that last May”. Never a good sign for a show.

Once in a while one of these shows surprises us. I often try to throw things out in the garbage but the Masked Wife will look through the garbage on collection day and I discover that items are back in the house. Some TV shows are like that. I think “The Carmichael Show” was tossed out only to live another day. Believe it or not “Just Shoot Me” had a similar history. I don’t believe that any of these shows will experience a similar fate.

Yizkor is a memorial service for the dead so let’s buy the deli platters and pay a Shiva call to:

CROWDED

HEARTBEAT

THE CATCH

RUSH HOUR

GAME OF SILENCE

Some of these were big-ticket items but I think there will be some cutting of losses here.

On a more positive note, have to believe that CRIMINAL MINDS: BEYOND BORDERS could well be at next year’s Kol Nidre service or, at the very least have a seat at next year’s Passover Seder. It’s the perfect show for the age of Trump and yet another example of increasing your chances for success by colonizing a hit.

SETTING THE SCHEDULE -- OVERTURE

By mid-May the broadcast networks will have announced their plans for the 2016-17 season. In the good old days the upfront presentations in New York were pretty simple. Here’s the schedule. Here’s some backup. Here are some movies and specials. Here are the sporting events you will want to be part of. See you at the bar.

Over the years things started to get a bit more complicated. Broadcast networks, being part of something larger, started to include their cable channels in the presentation. Digital platforms started to become a factor in media buys. The concept of year round programming was introduced where midseason shows were often placed in time periods to show the advertiser that the networks were not going dark. As reality television grew the summer became more of a factor. There were occasions where a Network President would go through dramas, comedy and reality and then, as an afterthought, put up a schedule. And, of course, delayed viewing needed to be addressed. 

This is not an easy business and it gets more difficult every year. What hasn’t changed much over the thirty-five years that I worked in broadcast television (research and scheduling) is the programming cycle. For better or worse, before we see any evidence that the shows announced in the upfront will succeed or fail, the development executives start getting pilot pitches targeted for the next season. Scripts start to get ordered, Agents pit networks against each other in bidding wars for the hot shows and talent. By December and January decisions are made as to what scripts will go to the pilot stage. Some shows are ordered straight to series. We blink and it’s late April. We screen the pilots, hear the research and set another schedule.

Sure there’s some off-cycle development but, to be honest, that’s still the exception and not the rule. Toward the end of Kevin Reilly’s tenure as President/Chairman of FBC Kevin sat in front of the TV press and put up a tombstone with the words “PILOT SEASON” on it. I knew that meant Kevin’s time was coming to an end. There are forces that want to keep the process in place and I believe there is a rhythm to all this that has been internalized by programming executives. There is an addiction to the process as it is.

So, as the scheduler, how did I fit in to all of this? Well, depending on who my boss was at the moment, I would try to articulate a strategy based on what I felt our short term and long term program needs were going to be. I would often be given the scripts of the final contenders to read and I would offer my opinion for what it was worth. I would also be communicating with the various constituencies (Sales, Marketing, Network Distribution, Press and Publicity) to understand what their issues would be come May. Depending on who the development executives were at the moment I would be offered rough cuts of the pilots to help me start figuring out a schedule.

All this would lead up to Pilot weeks which generally spanned the end of April through early May. At both FOX and, before that NBC, these two weeks were my show. I don’t know how it worked at the other networks but the responsibility for gathering the participants, figuring out how and what to screen, deciding how and when to present the program testing (at FOX both research and scheduling reported to me) and who would be in the scheduling room were all produced by the scheduling department in consultation with the head of the network.

Putting together a schedule is a lot like childbirth. No two births are alike and every year the scheduling process was different. There were the easy years and there were the disasters. Some years we would make the decisions, hug, high five each other and merrily fly off to NYC. There were other years where there was a lot of venom. On one occasion, I came home, packed and told the Masked Wife that I fully expected to be fired when we returned from the upfront presentation.

With all the changes to the industry I have been amazed at how seriously these two weeks are taken and you still see people go up to the scheduling board (yes we still used a board while I was there) and their hands would shake as they tried to articulate their recommendations for a schedule. I grew a bit jaded about the whole thing as my years in the biz were coming to an end. People would stop me in the hallways of FOX and ask if I was excited about Pilot week. I would honestly tell them no.

For the last few years of my tenure at FOX I chose to screen the pilots with the Script Club. They were the young assistants, and managers in programming and other areas of the company. I did it for two reasons. I felt that I could give them some perspective on the whole process. Talk to them about strategy and which pilots might work on our schedule and why. I have always been a teacher at heart. I also just needed to get away from everybody and all the bullshit. I know people worked very hard to develop these pilots but I was looking for an environment of honesty and I found it by hanging with the “kids”.

 By the time we got into the scheduling room I had a pretty good idea as to where we would wind up. We had internal input on the pilots, we had the testing, and I had been talking and listening to all the constituencies. It wasn’t necessarily the schedule I wanted but rather the schedule that would service the many interests within the company with Sales the most important voice (in my opinion).

I would be asked to put up a schedule to get the conversation going. I would go up to the board put up the schedule and give it my best pitch. I would sit down and “go away”. How can that be the schedule? We’re going to have to talk about it for three days. I remember at least once when someone was talking to me while I was “away” and my pal Melva Benoit who ran research said “Oh he’s not here”.

Well now that I’m really away, I thought that it would be a good time to share with you all tales of my 27 years of Pilot Weeks. I’ll break it into tales of the screening process, fun stories of pilot testing and research presentations and give you a peek behind the curtain of the scheduling process. Hopefully, as the networks announce their schedules, these stories will give you some perspective. Maybe you will also have some appreciation as to just how difficult these jobs can be.

These are my recollections and in no way should this be taken as how things have worked at the other shops, nor how it will be at FOX this year. However, there may be some nodding of heads if anyone actually reads this.

Stay tuned.

AMERICAN IDOL OUT

This Thursday, at the Dolby Theater, the fifteenth American Idol will be announced and then the show goes away…at least for the moment. That’s about forty hours of programming FOX will have to come up with and, honestly, if you play the odds, the new hours will not deliver a 2.0 L+SD rating in 18-49’s and the hours might not be a whole lot cheaper. But that’s Fox’s dilemma to deal with. I don’t work there anymore. I did for fifteen years and for most of that time American Idol was a big part of my professional life.

I started at FOX in June 2000 and in September of 2001 the world changed. I will always believe that the events of September 11 had a lot to do with why American Idol resonated with the viewers. It’s not like there hadn’t been any talent shows on the networks prior to Idol. I still remember telling my daughter about it and she stared at me and said “Dad, that’s Pop Stars” which was a little show on the WB. She did not seem all that excited.

Rupert Murdoch was excited about Pop Idol, which was a big hit in England. His daughter Liz sold him on it and Rupert told Sandy Grushow, Gail Berman and Mike Darnell, the FOX Entertainment chiefs and our head of reality, we were buying it. Rupert told them they needed to make it as big as it was in England. We were all skeptical.

My first involvement with the show was a meeting in Sandy’s office with Simon Fuller and possibly Cecile Frout Coutaz from Freemantle. To Sandy Grushow’s credit, he insisted that we would not do the show unless Simon Cowell would be one of the judges. We had seen Cowell’s antics on the British version and, since this was FOX, we needed someone who would give the show an edge. We continued to be skeptical. I remember in January of 2002 being at a meeting with Rupert where Mike Darnell was going over the show and our “plans” to change the format. Rupert was not happy and told Mike, in no uncertain terms, to keep the format as it was. I think the term ‘you Americans” was used at some point as Rupert was pounding the desk.

Well we did stick to the British format but with one exception. Sometime in the early spring I got a call from Mike to come down to his office there was a problem. When I arrived Simon Fuller, Nigel Lythgoe and possibly Cecile and Ken Warwick were there. Ken and Nigel were the Idol executive producers. Since Idol was a competition show based on viewer voting they suddenly realized that the US has four time zones (five if you include Hawaii) and that Idol could not replicate the British formula of voting and then returning to the air later in the evening to report the results. Mike and I had to explain the difference between network and affiliate time and all the issues involved with that. We played around with different solutions such as excluding the West Coast from participating in the voting. Finally, I threw out the idea of a second show that would air the night following the voting. I suggested a half hour results show and, since Idol was coming on in the summer, and I was the head of scheduling, I was certain that I could figure out how to get it on the schedule. Of course there was a money issue with the additional hours but Mike and I pitched this to Gail and Sandy and they agreed that we needed to include the whole country in this show. My moment in TV history.

As the auditions began we started to get nervous that no one would show up. My daughter was in high school and, when the auditions were in LA I gave her flyers to put all over her school. We were desperate. We announced a schedule for Idol and started to promote the show with scenes from the auditions. The promos mostly focused on Cowell eviscerating young auditioners, often well deserved. It was the classic way FOX promoted most of its product. We were never big on heart. At some point Mike gave me rough cuts of the auditions and I brought them home to share with my family. We were amazed at how moving several of the auditions were. One would never know it from the promos. I told Mike and Sandy that there was another sell to this show that pushed the emotions. Not everyone wanted to see innocent young singers being ‘bullied” by this Brit. We added some emotional spots and I would like to believe that helped us to broaden out the potential Idol audience.

Idol premiered June 11, 2002 and the wild ride started. The initial numbers were good but not where we felt that we had a phenomenon on our hands. The auditions AND Hollywood lasted a week. After what we called the Middle Rounds and a Wild Card show we were down to ten Finalists and, within eight weeks we were done. The whole show was twenty-two and a half hours.  I knew we were in good shape when I heard Kelly Clarkson sing. She was everything you could hope for in a show that was asking America to pick a singing superstar. The key to reality TV is authenticity, which is the first thing to leave these shows.  Kelly, Ruben and Clay, Fantasia and Carrie Underwood. We were fortunate to start off this phenomenon with authentic unknowns. Like many of these shows, at some point it all starts to feel manufactured.

                                                                   

Anyway, the ratings kept building and building and we realized we had something very special on our hands. About half way through the finals I was vacationing in Maui and I ran into Gail Berman who was there with her family. We high-fived each other and went out for a celebratory dinner. We both knew that, as exciting as this all was, the hard work was ahead of us. We saw what happened over at ABC with ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and we knew that we had to quickly figure out a plan for making this show part of our schedule for years to come.

After some debate we decided to run Idol once a year and bring it back in January 2003 and make that the permanent start to the Idol season. We expanded to thirty-six hours plus a few specials. We knew we had gold in the auditions so we added several hours to that part of the show. We went to twelve finalists and expanded several of the results shows to an hour. We took some shit from the other networks for expanding the show but, of course, once they found success with this format, they immediately added additional hours to their shows.

We were anxious to see what the second season of Idol would do. It’s one thing to have a summer success but now we were moving the show into the season against big time competition. I remember Mike Gail and I talking about having a pajama party at the office the night of the Idol premiere so we would all be together for the overnights. We didn’t but I came to the office early the morning after the premiere and there was Gail. The numbers stunned us.

We stayed around thirty-seven hours for the next two seasons but made a significant change to the format in Season 4 when we made the middle round of the show a “Boy/Girl Round”. We wanted to insure an even splint between the sexes. This move was in response to the strength of the women singers in Season 3 when, if I remember correctly, five of the final six singers were women. To do this shift correctly we needed more hours but, of course, with success comes conflict. We could not make the deal for more hours of Idol so we needed to tape the middle round. This resulted in one of our first crises as we put the wrong phone numbers on the contestants. Several of us spent a long night at the office as we figured out what to do about it. Although we were often criticized for ‘fixing’ the show I can tell you we never did, we wound up repeating the performance the following night with the correct numbers on the screen. That’s when I realized we needed a phone tree.

Season 4 of Idol was memorable in several ways. We had our biggest Idol success story in Carrie Underwood. We started our run as the #1 network in the 18-49 demographic. We added House to the schedule, which was the most successful scripted series to ever benefit from an American Idol lead-in. Finally, that year we moved 24 to Monday night and aired it without interruption through its season run. We called that the ‘shock and awe” part of our schedule. Sunday (often leading out of an NFL playoff game) and Monday four hours of 24 and then Tuesday and Wednesday four hours of American Idol auditions. Wherever we ranked season-to-date among the broadcast nets that changed pretty quickly.

What all the networks find when they have a mega-hit is that it’s hard to launch other hits behind it. We were fortunate to have House. Bernie Mac worked behind Idol but we quickly opted to give The OC the Idol push. Idol had a strong African-American audience for a lot of its run and The OC was one of the most vanilla shows on our schedule. Bones of course benefitted from the Idol rub and had the added benefit of being a show that we owned. To be honest what worked best behind Idol were other reality shows that commanded a lower cpm (cost per thousand) than scripted entertainment. Bottom line: we were not much better than the other networks at taking advantage of a smash hit to launch other hits.

We were now on a roll. For me Season 5 was the best season ever. We had the first of a run of mediocre winners but Season 5 had the deepest bench of Idols both in terms of talent and character. We also hit upon the right format, extending the hours of auditions and sticking with the boy/girl middle round. With several behind-the-scenes issues resolved we were able to do the boy/girl rounds right for the next three seasons.  

For me Season 8 was the pivotal year for American Idol. The ratings were starting to decline so there was a feeling among the powers that be that we needed to shake things up…and we did. We eliminated the boy/girl round of 24 and went back to a final 36 where groups of 12 contestants performed over three weeks. We added a fourth judge in Kara Dioguardi thus telling the world Paula Abdul’s days were numbered. After years of resistance on our part we added the judge’s save to the show. We negotiated with the producers as to how deep into the show the save could be used and we made sure that they stuck to it. Finally, the auditions, which were the highest rated part of the show, were taking on a nasty tone and the ratings were reflecting it.

We did a content analysis on the auditions dividing the segments into “good auditions” “bad auditions” and “delusional auditions” the last category being contestants who think they’re good enough to be on Idol but are ignorant as to how bad they are. We found that the percent of the auditions that could be categorized as “bad auditions”, people who the producers knew were awful but might either be entertaining or fodder for the judges abuse, was growing and was close to sixty percent of the show. I discussed this with Mike Darnell and we shifted the mix back to better auditions. We saw an uptick in the ratings but, to be honest, it was too late to turn the show around.

For several years I would do a long and extensive research presentation to the core group of producers and Fox execs that would gather after the season ended. I would start every year with a chart showing the life cycle of the big reality shows on all the networks. It was inevitable that all these series, successful as they were, would start to decline. I would tell my colleagues that we had a choice. We can either let Idol crash and burn or bring it in for a soft landing. To be honest I think we did a bit more of the former and less of the later.

In 2014 when Idol brought in a new Executive Producer I sent him, at his request, an essay that I called “Death By a Thousand Cuts”. My thesis was that there was no significant event that caused Idol to go into freefall but, rather, it was the result of several small decisions, which combined led to the +20% declines over several seasons.

Was there a moment when this all could have ended differently? Yes, it was when we delayed the launch of X Factor by a year after we planned the transition of Cowell from Idol to X Factor. That gave NBC the opening to introduce The Voice that was more akin to X Factor than to American Idol. This also kept Cowell off the air for over a year. That was not the plan. Once Idol was not THE singing competition but one of three well….

But let me end this by celebrating all that the people of FOX and its partners accomplished for over a decade. We created the Death Star but I honestly believed we kept level heads during this moment in the history of the business.

For me what I miss more than everything about the Idol years are the 5:30 AM calls that Mike Darnell and I had during virtually the entire run of the show. Research reported to me and I would ask to get the preliminary ratings fifteen minutes before they were released to a somewhat larger group. I would send them to Mike and, within a minute, my phone would ring and we were off on one of our long conversations about the numbers, Idol, the business and life in general. I will always cherish those calls.

We’ll dim the lights for the final time this Thursday. I hope there will be other shows that can excite America, and attract massive audiences, like Idol did. Different world now but if you work in the broadcast business you have to believe.