The anemic tv fare of summer '08

Cafe Society
1

Yeah, yeah. I know. Summer is not prime tv scheduling. The netorks think that everybody is out on b-b-q:s or whatever, so they aim to make 20-24 episodes of 42 minute tv fill a whole season from September to May.

The funny thing, some 30 odd years ago, the same production companies, acting as movie producers, realized that summer is the best time for big blockbuster movies. So one would think that these same studios would figure out that even if people are on vacation, when they come home at night, they’d like so crash on the couch and watch some mildly entertaining tv for an hour or so.

Of course, we know this is not the way the networks behave. Re-runs and so called reality shows rule the air. But for some minor neytworks, summer has been a good place for shows without mass appeal, but with quality.
**The ** 4400, Burn Notice, The Closer, Eureka. All are summer shows which appearantly makes a profit, since they get renewed. Obviously people are watching tv and thus this should be a large, untapped source of revenue, iow:

Fuck the plans, let’s roll **24 ** frome June through August, SGA strike be damned!

It’s not as if there’s a tough competion.
I guess that the lackluster scheduling this summer in part has to do with the strike. One example is that Eureka returns late July.
But why aren’t the networks trying to find an audience during summer?

2

I would assume it has something to do with what people’s schedules are during the summer. Summer is when people go on vacation, when they take their kids to different summer camps or classes or whatever, when people will stay outside later because it gets dark later, etc. I think the average person’s schedule would be more irregular during the summer; during the summer they might miss half of a show’s new episodes because they are doing something else, while during the rest of the year their schedule might be more predictable and they’d only miss one or two new episodes of House or whatever.

And it’s true that summer is the blockbuster season for movies. But if a family is on vacation in Florida when The Dark Knight comes out, then they might take an evening during vacation and go see it, or see it as soon as they get back home from vacation. But if they are on vacation and a new episode of Law & Order is on, they probably won’t go back to their hotel to watch it, and will probably just wait for the reruns to see that episode. I might be totally off, but this is what I’m guessing.

Obviously this is slowly changing as more people get DVR’s, but still a lot of TV is watched live rather than time delay.