SCHEDULING A TV MEMORIAM
An RIP Of Sorts for a Once-In-Demand Television Industry Gig
When it was announced back in June that Kevin Levy would be leaving his longtime post as EVP of Scheduling, Planning, and Acquisitions at The CW network, it seemed to make for just the latest headline in the daily evolving television business. These things happen. People come and go. Change begets change.
But it was the word Scheduling that made the headline stand out in bolder print. For some anyway. For TV longtimers of a certain stripe, say. Much like how it stood out in the handful of other recent headlines connected to the departures of other broadcast-TV execs leaving the same kind of role Levy held*.
Because for TV longtimers of a certain stripe, it’s the word that intrigued them about it as tube-tuning kids, well before they even knew it was a thing. It’s the word that lured them to their media careers as adults, having come to know it was.
For them, the word Scheduling is network television.
Or used to be.
Based on, or at least strongly suggested by, these headlines, it’s the word that’s slowly becoming irrelevant to the medium, having less and less meaning as television itself comes to mean more and more.
Broadcast television revenues still pivot on the whens and wheres of a primetime grid, but in this our streaming world they’re connected to so much more now. As evidenced by Levy’s full former title, it’s about content strategy and acquisitions, too. In an era of digital windowing, Mondays at 9 is so last century.
After all, who needs a meal to be scheduled when all the food is self-serve?
As a new TV season unfolds (or at least as what passes for one in 2023), it all makes those of a certain stripe … reflect. On just another change begotten of change that to them feels like a tiny bit more.
Television didn’t invent the word. As a printed timetable, railroad and radio got there first. Then in 1946 TV got in the schedule game — first via NBC and Dumont, the only fully operational networks at the time, and then with CBS and ABC joining them in 1948. No real science or strategy yet. Just a timetable to facilitate regular viewing — Here’s what comes on when with this new thing — with value coming to be derived for the whats based on the whens and wheres.
A look at a (local) schedule from when TV officially began as a commercial medium in 1941:
In the 1950s, network schedules got more standardized as TV settled in. Involved more strategy. A successful schedule could make a hit series; a well-slotted series could make an entire schedule. Scheduling (now a verb, too) could be used offensively, to push a network down the field to most-viewers victory, or defensively, to stave off that march, with counterprogramming.
In success, a popular series could become synonymous with when it aired, too, serving as promotion for both the series and the night. Sunday in the 1950s, for instance, meant Toast of the Town/The Ed Sullivan Show, while Monday meant I Love Lucy and Tuesday meant Milton Berle. Further along, Wednesday in the 1960s meant The Beverly Hillbillies, and Monday meant The Lucy Show; and in the 1970s Tuesday meant Happy Days, and Monday, at least early in the decade, meant Here’s Lucy. (All three of Lucille Ball’s CBS sitcoms — 18 seasons worth — aired on Monday, with the night so equated with “CBS comedy” that even after Ball left the air in 1974, Monday at 9pm continued to mean it for another 44 years, for a total of 67 seasons, until 2018.)
In scheduling, familiarity breeds content.
TV scheduling — and those who work in it — took on a spotlight of its own beginning in the 1970s, much of which was due to CBS’s game-changing newcomer All in the Family in 1971 and to Fred Silverman, the CBS exec credited with its success. Silverman’s star shone so bright — nicknamed The Man With the Golden Gut, he was the focus of a 1977 Time cover story — that by the end of the decade he’d be hired away (twice) to run competing networks ABC and NBC, succeeding at the former and failing spectacularly at the latter. But at all three posts, he was front-page news. The peeks inside TV proved inspiring. For those of a certain stripe, anyway.
For Silverman and other Scheduling execs of the decade, the prime-time line-ups were equal parts toys to be fiddled with and weapons to be wielded — the latter for a (mostly friendly) wargame being played on an increasingly more competitive and more lucrative field. Viewers themselves were all but on the grass, their emotional TV investments stoked in the prime-time maneuvering. With special hour-long editions of half-hour hits (Rhoda’s 1974 wedding, the 1975 and 1976 season premieres of Happy Days, four different M*A*S*H episodes). For event programming in a new form called the miniseries (Rich Man Poor Man in 1976 and Roots a year later). For reunion movies that mined first-generation-of-television nostalgia (Father Knows Best Reunion and Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas, Murder in Peyton Place, Halloween with the New Addams Family, The New Maverick, The Wild Wild West Revisited, The Return of the Mod Squad, Rescue from Gilligan’s Island).
Much of American television business in the 1970s was in the hands of that first generation of those raised on it — now doing their things with it. Among those watching and taking notes: a second generation of viewers, watching both the content and the business. Those of a different stripe, say. Little stoked them more than reading of the new-schedule announcements in the spring and then watching their roll-outs in the fall, TV Guide Fall Preview edition in hand. NBC’s Hail-Mary placement of Emergency against All in the Family, CBS’s 1973–74 championship-season Saturday (All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, The Bob Newhart Show, The Carol Burnett Show), NBC’s revitalized Friday in 1974 (Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, The Rockford Files, Police Woman), the forced migration in 1975 of longtime favorites to later timeslots thanks to The Family Hour, the 1977 Summer-of- Soap controversy — excited talking-points for them, all.
(The scheduling of soundalike sitcoms Good Times and Happy Days against each other mid-decade always irked them, however.)
Come the 1980s, 32-year-old Brandon Tartikoff arrived as prime-time’s new King Scheduler, replacing ousted now-old-guard Fred Silverman at NBC. Younger and of better temperament, he made scheduling fun. And funny. And in the process, he became even more the celebrity than Silverman had been, to the point of hosting a 1983 edition of Saturday Night Live.
Tartikoff used scheduling to make bad nights good (Saturday, effective with The Golden Girls in 1985) and middling nights legendary (Thursday, effective with the arrival of The Cosby Show in 1984, laying the groundwork for NBC’s 1990s Must-See-TV campaign). Under him, NBC became the country’s top-rated network.
But a whole new broadcast TV network showed up this decade, too — FOX — which disturbed the decades-long three-network equilibrium. For those of a certain stripe, it stirred intrigue and excitement — curious about how to launch new programming from scratch against stronger networks with deeply rooted constituencies — but it also stirred caution and concern. FOX marked the arrival of a challenge that would face both network scheduling and the entire network business: audience fragmentation.
When the divining rod known as Scheduling led those of a certain stripe — kids of the 1970s Scheduling explosion, admirers of its 1980s evolution, repeat viewers of big-screen movie Network— to their own TV jobs in the 1990s, it was at a time when broadcast networks faced more and more issues related to compounding disinterest. Changes in rules (ownership), consumption (delayed viewing), competition (still more new networks) and content (shape-shifting of genres). When the Big Three (or Four, depending) started ceding Sunday nights to HBO’s The Sopranos in the late 90s, the writing showed itself on the wall.
The long-held sense of peaceful co-existence among the networks became a bit less peaceful, scheduling-wise, around this time too. Schoolyard-level competition gave way at times to a more aggressive kind. Mean-ness and vindictiveness were threaded into decisions. (Silly, really.) Still, in the hands of the many who grew up fascinated by the world and the word, there were triumphs in scheduling that underscored the value of timeslots — ABC’s TGIF Friday, the animation celebration/domination that was FOX Sunday, CBS western-themed Saturday, NBC’s secretly admired-and-envied Must-See-TV success, themed nights and crossover blocks. When FOX moved Wednesday hit Melrose Place to the beginning of its week, it did so with a campaign that offended some — a close-up of series super-villain Heather Locklear under the words “Mondays Are a Bitch” — but schedulers celebrated it. Because it was about placement.
Scheduling remained elemental here and there to broadcast-TV as the century turned — the long runs of both FOX’s 24 and ABC’s Lost hinged on it; slotting the CBS powerhouse Survivor/CSI combo against NBC’s Thursday sitcoms dismantled the latter’s Must-See-TV dominance — but the New Normal was delayed-and-binge viewing, which also nullified it. Incrementally, as viewing choices multiplied, prime-time schedules as a whole came to be discounted: The whats (TV series) were deemed more integral to survival — and central to network promotion — than the whens and wheres. TV started to get more … complicated. For everybody — those working in it and those watching it. What airs when, exactly? One network scheduler famously and publicly lamented: “These days, we’re teaching people how not to watch television.”
The concept of line-ups was on its way to anathema status. Less and less an object of fascination or discussion or strategy. Or importance. A new generation was being raised on content rather than timeslots. (When guest speaking at NYU in 2010, I took a question from a student about a certain brand-new NBC drama that I’d yet to watch; when I reflexively asked him to remind me when it was on, he blanched and chuckled. “When’s it on?” he replied. “No offense, Mr. McKairnes, but it’s on when I turn it on.”) Streaming in the 2010s reinforced this. Cord-cutting in the 2020s sealed it. Mention “TV schedules” to the average under-30 today and await the chuckle.
But from the late 1940s to the early 2000s, from Little Ricky’s 1953 birth to the Parks and Rec/The Office/Community Thursday-night trifecta of 2009, scheduling made hits, defined nights, compelled viewers, created experiences. It also saved many a low-rated series headed for cancellation rather than the icon status it later achieved. The Dick Van Dyke Show survived by dint of its second-season placement after The Beverly Hillbillies in 1962. Struggling newcomer M*A*S*H lived to run eleven seasons once it was slotted after All in the Family in 1973. Family Ties was just another so-so-rated domesticom until The Cosby Show pulled it into the Top Ten. Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office — each a struggling new show that benefitted from better scheduling.
Themed nights still exist on broadcast TV, though back-to-back all-night blocks like ABC’s Shonda-Rhimes led TGIT Thursday in the 2010s and the current Dick Wolf drama stacks on both NBC and CBS are more about showrunner power and influence than anything else. As for Schedulers, they’re still here, too. The duties once performed by those who’ve left Scheduling-related positions the past few years have been re-assigned to or absorbed by capable others. But these days, to viewers anyway, it all seems a bit of, “Well, it has to go somewhere.”
Still, as another new season unfolds, it’s without the longtime schedulers behind those recent headlines, which by my math adds up to about a 100 years total of network experience and TV-history acumen that could be applied to it when it needs it most. Scheduling doesn’t really run the game anymore. Lead-ins and lead-outs and hammock shows and tentpoles and companion pieces and four-stacks and Sweeps and retention have given way to analytics and optimization and algorithms.
The new strategy is curation. It’s a successful business plan, but it’s hard to say where the fun is in that. Or where the TV fan — be it an executive or a viewer — fits in.
(Overheard said by one high-ranking decision-making streamer exec a few years ago: “Isn’t streaming great? You put all these shows on, and it doesnt matter if anyone watches!”)
But for some — those of a certain stripe, say — a new TV season these days is just plain more about what was (the magic that used to be the creation and execution of a 22-hour prime-time TV week) than what will be. As a career? These days, Scheduling is up there with switchboard-operator or farrier: The work’s still done, but it’s not exactly in high demand.
And that’s something to be a bit bummed about, even with the acknolwedgement that change begets change.
For those of a certain stripe, say.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Those of a certain stripe know and worked with Levy, as well as the other recent headliners referred to in this piece.
