Attention, Les & Barry: Broadcast Giant Files For Bankruptcy, Blames CW Ratings

13 Comments »

1. Look! There’s some old bandwidth for sale.

   Yawn…

   Google should buy the CW off, just to fuck with everyone’s heads.

   Dunno if it would pass anti-trust, but it would be bold on the cheap for Cali. Bwhoo-haha!

   Cause Jobs is about to eat Adobe. Launch our 3G “Buddha” Phone. And own flash and quicktime. Y’all…

   We don’t roll with no losin’ men.

   Comment by at&t — May 11, 2008 @ 9:49 pm

2. Pappas owns CBS and Fox here. They’ve done a good job of branding them together. Too bad. Probably will see all of that changed now.

   Comment by Jason — May 11, 2008 @ 10:46 pm

3. And yet the CW had one of the best development seasons I’ve ever seen. Aliens In America and Reaper are Emmy caliber. And Gossip Girl is a really good fan based show. And Everybody Hates Chris is one of the best sit-coms on the air.

   Go figure!

   Comment by Peggy Lane O'Rourke — May 11, 2008 @ 11:47 pm

4. “One of the best development seasons” on The CW? Isn’t that like being one of the liveliest corpses in the graveyard? Why that network is still on the air is beyond me.

   Comment by Reader — May 12, 2008 @ 7:44 am

5. Hmmm. So CW afiliates are going down the toilet. Maybe it should have been called the WC after all.

   Comment by Swirling Eddy — May 12, 2008 @ 10:00 am

6. “poor ratings of the CW Network”

   Wow, you live long enough, you’ll see everything. And sometimes you don’t even have to wait that long.

   The bosses took the well-branded, tapped-in WB, which smart minds worked so hard over the years to create (and I wasn’t even a watcher of the network, but I sure got what they were trying to accomplish), and got rid of it. Handed it over to the then-worst network on television, UPN. In order to birth the inexplicable farce that is the CW.

   A couple of years later what happens? The CW is cited for poor ratings leading to a let-go.

   I’m not sure what goes on in the heads of network heads and the like, and half the time you wonder whether it’s because you’re just not plugged into the info that drives their decisions. But when you read the behind-the-scenes books they later on write, you realize there’s no magic info you’re missing, no great mystery to be revealed.

   The problem just boils down to the fact that they’re not consuming the products they put out, and therefore have no idea what’s working and what’s not. It’s sort of like the classic case of when Birds of Prey or Angel was going to be cancelled and an exec decided to watch a few episodes of the shows to see which one should go. Upon watching, he realized of course no question about it, Angel should stay, since Birds of Prey wasn’t even in the same league of television. These shows were on his own network (the WB).

   Exactly how do you consider yourself a professional in an industry if you actually have to perform this asinine exercise in order to make a basic decision like that? I apologize for ranting, but it’s just so ludicrous. MIllions of dollars get wasted and jobs get canned, and meanwhile the marketplace is facing killer competition from the nets, videogames and even homevid. Common sense requires that you be one step ahead of your consumers, not several years behind them.

   Comment by Ella — May 12, 2008 @ 10:35 am

7. But didn’t Nikki say that the CW was the network that didn’t need a strike because they would lose the most money. I also recall that Les Moonves was one of the people that was involved in the informal talks that ended the writers strike. At least we can be happy that Les cares about his TV properties while Barry Mayer would just love to see the CW fail in order to save money.

   It is my prayer that the judge does consider the strike in his decisions. My guess is that he will do so because Fresno California is part of the liberal 9th Ciricut US Court. My guess is that by the end of the year, the AMPTP will lose bigtime to the SAG due to this bankruptcy in which we will likely see fresh talks lead to a behind the scenes deadline deal that avoids a strike.

   Another impact this bankruptcy will have on the film and TV industry is that the judge will have the power to subpeona the tax and accounting records of all networks involved in the bankruptcy filing, as well as the raw ratings information that is owned by Nielsen, and the deal that lead to the CW in the first place. Even the WWE could be called in to testify as to why they moved Smackdown from UPN/CW to My Network TV. My guess is that My Network TV is better prepared to weather a strike except one by Tom Short’s guild if they had any balls.

   In any case, I hope that the judge does the right thing and that is Les & Barry paying Pappas’s creditors. We all know that they have money to spend and that money will help them keep the stations in their hands.

   Comment by Jessy S. — May 12, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

8. Well, in my household, the only CW shows we watch are Reaper, which is one of the best new shows of the year, and Gossip Girl, which makes CW the least watched network here. I think that’s one of the problems. It needs flashier, high concept shows rather than quirky, fuzzy, hard-to-define, message shows. It should have tried to be more like The WB in its heyday than UPN, which is what it feels like now.

   Comment by Dan Zee — May 12, 2008 @ 12:28 pm

9. Crap TV. Crap ratings. No surprise. It’s *never* a “difficult business climate” if you produce programs people actually want to watch.

   Note to CW Execs: If you chase a narrow, niche demographic and then add into the mix unbelievably bad, (seemingly) cheaply made TV programming you’re not gonna succeed. It’s called putting all your eggs in one basket. Never a good idea. In investing. In business relationships. In TV programming. You name it.

   When *everyone* seems to be chasing the same 18-35 demographic and doing relatively badly at it (even “Idol” is slipping) maybe it’s time to re-think the conventional wisdom? Just a thought.

   Comment by Christopher Grove — May 12, 2008 @ 1:22 pm

10. Chris Grove is right as well as Dan Zee. In its heyday, the WB was known as a family centered network no matter how much the media wanted to downplay that fact. As much as the shows were “teen based” there was still a family element in them. Pick any series in its heyday and there is a family element in there. Even Veronica Mars has that element and was pretty much penciled in for the post Gilmore Girls slot in that show’s season five. Both the WB and Veronica Mars would have likely been still on the air if UPN hadn’t picked up the show.

    Comment by Jessy S. — May 12, 2008 @ 11:28 pm

11. It’s a real shame. i was a fan of theWB and was surprised and a little disappointed it would team up with UPN to become theCW. ever since then, the shows are of low calibre. they lost the plot/formula that was working for them.

    The shows we watch are Smallville and Gossip Girl. Smallville is a waste. when it was with the WB it was ok. Now its awful. GG is great. But its not enough obviously. I don’t know how popular One Tree Hill is in the states but I assume it has to be ok to be even considered in the UK.

    Comment by Kay — May 13, 2008 @ 7:05 am

12. Dawn Ostroff does it again, first she destroyed UPN and now the CW.

    When will the exec’s learn she’s better off being a script girl than a Network President.

    Star Trek Enterprise had better rating than the whole CW.

    Comment by Mike D. — May 13, 2008 @ 7:18 am

13. The shows that we routinely watch on the CW are WB holdovers Smallville and Supernatural. My husband and I have caught Reaper a few times since The Unit has been on hiatus. My daughter, at 13, enjoys America’s Next Top Model. Smallville I have always enjoyed because we watch together — gosh, remember when 8 o’clock used to be family hour?

    The onslaught of commercials for the CW’s ‘girrrl power’ shows PCD and GG is just nauseating. The Gossip Girl promo “OMFG” in particular was offensive and the excessively salatious portrayal of high school girls — especially at 8 o’clock is just — desperation. Desperation is never pretty — no matter how glossy.

    Why so desperate for Gossip Girl to be “it”? Why not cut their losses like everyone else and try again? Instead, the CW spends more money and extends the season of GG. Its no wonder its stations are in trouble.

    Maybe I’m missing something — but this doesn’t make much sense to me.

    Comment by Melanie — May 13, 2008 @ 8:37 am

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