The holiday feasting season is well underway, whether we’re talking about chowing down on turkey and stuffing or binge-watching reality TV.

NBCUniversal’s E Entertainment Tele-vision network is using a new show about Los Angeles Rams players and their wives called “Hollywood & Football” to launch its holiday schedule and bring in viewers – fans of the team and National Football League or not.

The show’s late-year launch, on Nov. 30, is part of E’s strategic decision to capture viewers outside of the traditional pilot season, said Jeff Olde, the network’s executive vice president of original programming and development. E will also debut its Mariah Carey documentary series, “Mariah’s World,” on Dec. 4.

“We tend to launch a lot of shows around this time of year,” he said. “It’s a time when our audience likes to catch up on shows, especially shows about other families.”

The six-episode first season of “Hollywood & Football” follows the personal lives of six Rams and their wives, including wide receiver Kenny Britt and his wife, Sabrina, as well as tight end Lance Kendricks and wife, Danielle. Viewers are offered a behind-the-scenes look at life in Los Angeles after the team relocated from St. Louis this summer. The show is produced by Culver City’s T Group Productions, producers of TruTV’s “Container Wars” and History Channel’s “Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour,” among many others.

Market extension

Olde described the show as more of a “family comedy” than a reality drama, calling it a natural extension of the network’s other sports-related programs, such as “Wags,” which premiered in August of last year and follows the wives and girlfriends of famous athletes. That show had solid ratings in its first two seasons, with its Sept. 25 second-season finale pulling in 560,000 viewers, good enough for the No. 28 ranking on cable for the evening. E also greenlit a spinoff series set in Miami, which premiered in October.

Now, the network is looking to score with its latest fourth-quarter debut.

“Football season is still in session and there’s a lot of first-season euphoria around the Rams’ return to Los Angeles,” said Chris Smith, co-director of the media, economics, and entrepreneurship program at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “And the luxury of serious downtime over the holidays means consumers might watch things they ordinarily might not watch. It’s the same behavior dynamic that drives overconsumption of food and alcohol this time of year.”

Smith noted that reality programming tends to lend itself well to mindless binge-watching, a precedent set with the premiere of Bravo’s “Project Runway” in December 2004, long before the days of Netflix.

“It had weak ratings at first, but then leveraged the downtime everyone had over the holidays, with a marathon programming stunt that promoted binge consumption – and the ratings got stronger and stronger,” Smith said.

For “Hollywood & Football,” an important factor will also be to capitalize on digital distribution formats, according to T Group’s Jenny Daly, who executive produced the show, along with Rob Lobl and Shauna Thomas.

The series, episodes of which are available to watch on E’s website and mobile app after first airing on Wednesdays at 9 p.m., is also going after a wider audience than another popular show featuring Rams players: HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” said Daly. Seventy percent of E’s viewers are women and Daly said the show’s themes in various locales throughout Los Angeles should help the network sell the show to audiences in a variety of ways.

“Our series focuses on what it means to live in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s really very different from HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks.’ They get the real minutiae that goes on inside the football and the training, whereas ours is really about family life.”

Daly acknowledged that the show’s success will ultimately be determined by ratings, but she noted that T Group is already planning for future seasons. The company is also in preproduction on spin-off shows in other NFL cities.

“We’re already casting for spinoffs in Denver, Miami, and New York,” she said.