By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
Updated 7h 49m ago |
A time-traveling family heads to the dinosaur age to save Earth. Pan Am stewardesses and Playboy bunnies relive the '60s, while that era's prisoners of Alcatraz reappear in the present day.
These are just a few of the out-there premises among the 81 pilots vying for a handful of spots on next fall's network TV lineups. After a sleepy 2010-2011 season that has taken few risks — and yielded fewer hits — programmers are simultaneously ginning up more escapist eye candy and more ambitious fare for fall.
Last year, "the networks were being very conservative and were going for standard meat-and-potatoes fare; they were just trying to get back to basics," says Carolyn Finger, president of TVtracker.com, which monitors development trends. The resulting "lackluster season" has been "respectable, but there's nothing that's in the zeitgeist," she says. "They have to have stuff that gets people excited."
Networks' risk tolerance tends to flow in cycles and often is a direct result of their competitive position. ABC was in the tank in the ratings in 2004 when it rolled the dice on groundbreaking mystery Lostand comic soap Desperate Housewives.
This season, all four major networks have lost some audience, and new shows drawing respectable crowds, such as CBS' Hawaii Five-0, aren't generating much excitement.
NBC and ABC — each with new top programming executives — are most aggressive in courting concepts outside the traditional cops, docs and courtrooms.
NBC has Grimm, a cop drama with characters "inspired" by fairy tales, and REM, an Inception-style story about a detective with parallel lives following a deadly car accident. ABC might try Poe, in which the author is an investigative reporter helping to solve crimes, and Once Upon a Time, another fairy-tale-inspired series.
"We are looking to take some risks and be louder and more provocative," says ABC development chief Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs. "We're looking at what put us on the map."
Fox is mulling Alcatraz, a crime drama from Lost producer J.J. Abrams, and has already ordered Terra Nova, a big-budget Steven Spielberg production in which a family travels back to the dinosaur age to save future Earth. It was originally supposed to premiere in May; a delay until fall was blamed on the elaborate special effects.
It's all part of a network development process, beginning each fall, in which pitches lead to script deals and, for some, sample episodes. Those are screened by networks, tested with focus groups and weighed against current on-the-fence series, all vying for slots on the fall schedules that will be announced in mid-May.
Of course, many of these seemingly risky bets won't ever make it to the TV screen; only about one in four pilots do. And those that do make the cut have an even smaller shot at success — just look at ABC's fanciful Pushing Daisies, CBS' short-lived musical Viva Laughlin and last fall's biggest bomb, Fox's Lone Star, about a con man living a double life.
But analysts say competition from edgier cable fare and the continued erosion of network audiences compels them to reach outside their safety zones.
Other trends:
•Period dramas. Many of the riskiest projects include period dramas, including Poe and Reconstruction, which follows the post-Civil War resettlement of a soldier. NBC's Playboy returns to the long-shuttered Chicago club, its bunnies and colorful customers; ABC's soapy Pan Am tackles the same era's stewardesses and pilots in the Jet Age. "It's Mad Menfor the masses," says Patmore-Gibbs, and speaks to ABC's target demographic by "looking at that historical context from a female perspective."
•Familiar faces. Networks aren't just embracing riskier concepts to get viewers' attention. Familiar faces from former TV hits remain in demand, even if their recent track records are spotty. Tim Allen might return to ABC with his first series since Home Improvement, in a comedy about a man surviving in a world dominated by women. Kiefer Sutherland, Debra Messing, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christina Applegate, Jenna Elfman, Minnie Driver, Heather Locklear and Damon Wayans also have bagged lead roles in pilots. So have Michael Chiklis and Jimmy Smits, fresh off failures this season (No Ordinary Family and Outlaw, respectively).
And hello, Betty White! Actors of a certain age are in demand: Don Johnson plays a celebrity hairstylist in NBC's A Mann's World; Christine Lahti joins her family's medical practice in CBS' The Doctors; Annie Potts is among the Dallas clan in an ABC soap whose current religiously offensive title is sure to change. And 1980s stars Cybill Shepherd and Judith Light play grandmas on proposed ABC family sitcoms.
•More laughs. Everyone's looking for comedy after a season that saw plenty of whiffs and only one new hit — CBS' Mike & Molly —which was helped greatly by having a now Charlie Sheen-lessTwo and a Half Men as its lead-in. Chalk up the lack of Modern Family and The Middle wannabes to the lag time in television development and a "super-frustrating" lack of pitches, says Patmore-Gibbs.
This year, there are plenty of multigenerational contenders in the works, and not just on ABC, which hopes to add an hour of laughs on a new night. NBC wants to expand its stable of arch workplace comedies with more centered on relationships, while CBS is heading in the opposite direction, eyeing contenders about employees of a venture-capital firm, a sports-radio show and a celebrity couple.
For sitcoms in particular, the potential rewards are great. Fewer hits have left a void in the lucrative syndication market, leaving local stations to depend more heavily on long-canceled series such as Seinfeldand Friends. Next fall, only CBS' The Big Bang Theorywill enter the rerun market.
•Remakes. Networks are fond of freshening well-known TV shows or movies with easily promoted updates (Hawaii Five-0 and 90210), and this pilot season is no exception. ABC has relocated Charlie's Angels to Miami, where Robert Wagner is the unseen boss. NBC is looking at an update of Wonder Woman (now sporting skintight long pants), produced by David E. Kelley, and a long-gestating remake of British detective series Prime Suspect.
Fox has already picked up an animated spinoff of Napoleon Dynamite, featuring the voices of the cult film's original cast. And the network has next season's only potential spinoff in The Finder, featuring a character to be introduced on Bones in the April 21 episode.
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