Battered Networks Anxious As Key Fall Season Debuts

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Four days after terrorists struck the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Fox scheduling chief Preston Beckman received a semi-frantic phone call from Fox TV Entertainment Chairman Sandy Grushow.

He had two words, “Independence Day,” Beckman recalled.

Beckman and his team were already on top of it.

In place of “Independence Day,” a film that depicts an alien invasion of earth and the destruction of the White House and much of New York that was scheduled to air that Sunday evening, Fox would run the mild Robin Williams comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

Even in that film, however, Fox management elected to cut the sound when one of the actors made a reference to a terrorist attack.

“Up until (Jan. 11) that would have been a joke,” Beckman, executive vice president of strategic program planning for Fox Broadcasting Co., said of the impromptu dubbing. “We’ve pulled a lot of movies to make sure we didn’t put anything on that would be inappropriate… The biggest issue has been sensitivity more than anything else.”

So it goes for television executives in the aftermath of the most devastating assault on U.S. territory since Pearl Harbor. This week, with the paper value of their parent corporations sinking, the networks will introduce much of their delayed fall schedules against a backdrop of widespread uncertainty about how Americans’ viewing and buying habits will be affected by the attacks and the anticipated U.S. response.

Amid the confusion, the networks’ best laid plans for the fall season are out the window, leaving programmers scrambling to minimize the damage at the start of the most important advertising period of the year.

“It’s unprecedented. There’s never been anything like this,” said Tim Spengler, the Los Angeles-based director of national broadcast for media buyer Initiative Media. “(The attacks) are not going to help the current environment, they’re going to make it worse.”


Making adjustments

At Fox, where premieres were staggered because of baseball playoff coverage playoffs that have now been pushed back a week Beckman and other executives have been tinkering with a schedule that was designed to avoid the slow starts Fox shows have gotten off to in recent fall seasons.

It’s a tricky problem for Fox because although baseball does well, the network’s series often debut after those of its competitors.

“We said ‘let’s not find ourselves out of the candy store the first two weeks of the season,'” Beckman said. “I thought we had a pretty good template in place for how we could approach baseball every year, but we’ll never know.”

Another example of the minutiae that executives have tackled following the suicide attacks involved the new Fox Kiefer Sutherland drama series “24,” which has a terrorist plot to assassinate the president. “24” will debut as planned in October, but “unfortunately when we promoted it, it was with a scene with a plane blowing up. Clearly we’re not going to be using that scene,” Beckman said.

While virtually all prime-time shows will air in their designated time slots, Fox, like other networks, has pushed much of its new fare back a week. Fox did not have to completely “unscramble the egg,” because of its staggered schedule, Beckman said, but it has been forced to make substantial adjustments to make all the pieces fit.

It’s a process that involves not just schedulers like Beckman but advertising managers, programmers, production heads and executives from just about every division of the network.

“You’re always trying to anticipate what could happen so when it does you’re not sitting around saying ‘what do we do,'” Beckman said.

Other networks have been similarly challenged.

In Burbank at the WB Network, some delayed premieres were scheduled a second time last week when the network signed on to participate in Friday’s telethon for victims of the terrorist attacks.

Paul McGuire, the WB’s senior vice president of network communications, said employees have been going over programming and promotions “with a fine tooth comb” to make sure that nothing with even a hint of the inappropriate gets on the air.

“It’s been disruptive. We’ve moved our schedule around once and we may have to do it again,” McGuire said. “It’s a season that will end with an asterisk next to it because of the odd series of events.”

In the meantime, McGuire and Beckman said their networks are doing their best to be prepared for the unexpected.

“You keep massaging it until you get it right,” Beckman said. “But as prepared as we are, something could change next week and all bets are off.”

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