Ranting On...the Sleepy Hollow Renewal

Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie of Sleepy Hollow

Yesterday morning, FOX announced that it would be renewing the show Sleepy Hollow.  When I first read this I was positive that the writers of the piece had misused the word renewed.  What they meant to say was that they'd given the show a full first season.  For those of you who are not television executives or spend your days fancying yourselves television executives (I'm the latter, for the record, not the former), when a first season show premieres, they don't necessarily start out with the full 22-24 episodes of the season.  Instead, they may start with an order for thirteen episodes, and then if the show is successful they order the "back-9:" the episodes that would be created to air in the spring.  Considering that Sleepy Hollow has been a strong ratings performer, the idea that FOX would order the back-9 makes complete sense, and wouldn't warrant anything resembling a rant.

But FOX ordered a second season of the show, not the back-9.  FOX's entertainment chief Kevin Reilly, in trying to shake up the network, has decided to model Sleepy Hollow more after the shorter, wildly successful model that cable television employs: air new episodes every week, but only 10-14 episodes in a season and then you're off the air for nine months until the next season.

This is a big deal for network television, and a risky way to play the game.  Broadcast television's Big 4 has been dealing with a lot in the past decade.  The rise of cable, YouTube, and streaming has made advertiser-funded channels like FOX look like dinosaurs.  Millions of people tune in to their shows still (more than 13 million people saw the Sleepy Hollow debut), but they don't have the cool factor or the convenience factor afforded cable and the internet.  In order to compete, they need to start to rethink their business models, and I suppose this is one way of doing that.

But there are several major ways that cable television differs from network that makes me very skeptical about this change in thought.  While shows like Duck Dynasty, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones pull in numbers that would make network television green with envy, for the most part network television, on a show-by-show basis, outperforms your average cable program.  Ratings are much more important to network television because their competitors are also, theoretically going to be putting up similar numbers and there's a lot of pressure on networks to compete with that model.  There's a reason that shows on network television rarely make it to a second season-it's a dog-eat-dog world in network, and looking at a season like 2012-13, less than ten shows on the Big 4 networks managed to survive to get renewed for a second go-around.

This matters because the networks have less time to grow and nurture their series.  Cable television programs will almost certainly, because they're on a tighter budget and because the episodes are already paid for, air the entire run of a series unless it's completely tanking.  A broadcast network wouldn't give a second thought to canceling a show after 1-2 airings, especially if they're fourth in their time slot.  This trigger happy aspect of broadcast television allows them to show a number of programs in a season (midseason is almost as important as the fall season at this point), but one of the reasons that cable television works so well is that they are giving the shows more time to find an audience.  This isn't possible if you're frequently axing shows and moving on to the next program.

The shortened seasons attribute of cable has to be much more appealing to network television, but only on a surface level.  An executive is going to see that it costs less to produce a shortened season, and that they won't have to invest as much into the series.  But this doesn't work if only one of the broadcast television shows is following this model.  If FOX is airing Sleepy Hollow for only thirteen episodes but ABC is airing a similarly-themed drama for 22 episodes over a longer period of time, who is the audience going to turn to when the new fall season starts?  DVR has helped people to stay with a show year-after-year, but DVR's fill up fast and scripted television relies principally on familiarity with characters and wanting to check in on their lives.  The shorter the season, the less likely that a show will have become "can't-miss viewing" for the audience.

Smash-a cautionary tale?

This fact has been proven time-and-again.  Every season there's one show that was a hit the previous season on network television but is now going bust.  Pushing Daisies, Smash, Revolution-all shows that were gone for too long and the audience moved on to something else.  It takes a show that has a massive cult following in the vein of 24 or Lost to get around that long wait period, and even those shows had longer seasons that most cable programs.

Of course, this is a problem that cable should face as well, but doesn't nearly to the extent that network television does, and so we need to deduce why cable succeeds here where network television fails to win with shortened seasons.

The first reason is pretty simple-cable television, by-and-large, is dominated by reruns and movies.  Channels like USA, TNT, TBS, and FX all are surrounded by big-screen movies airing repeatedly on television or endless marathons of Law and Order and Family Guy.  As a result, these channels don't have any issues moving around their schedule to accommodate one of their original broadcasts and will put an original program first, always.  This allows cable networks to air all of their episodes the same time every week until the end of the run of shows.  This isn't the case with network television-they are frequently interrupted by sports, awards shows, extended-run episodes and other highly rated live programs that take precedence but require that a show air a repeat during its original run or miss a week.  These events are too successful and too important to broadcast television to do away with, and as a result they cannot achieve the consistency that cable television does.

The second part, and the biggest and most crucial piece of this puzzle, is that cable television networks don't have as many original shows as network television.  A cable channel will have 6-10 original programs, and they aren't all airing them at the same time.  Network television, however, can have a couple of dozen original series that air in a given week, not to mention regular daytime and late night options for viewers.  Those many, many shows take up valuable advertising money and time, and allow new shows to get lost in the shuffle.  A channel like USA can air advertisements for White Collar ad nauseam, and can also do "catch-up" marathons for these shows to ensure that everyone is ready for the first new episodes of the season.  They can also air repeats of a show multiple times throughout the week in case a viewer missed it.  They have the money and time to nurture and offer-up an episode of a series that a network television show just doesn't have.

For all of these reasons, I think that FOX is being extremely foolish if they don't extend Sleepy Hollow for a back-9 and instead wait to bring it back in September.  The show could of course develop the following that a series like Lost did, but that sort of passion is the exception and not the rule.  Unless network television is willing to rethink its entire business model, it simply cannot succeed with the shortened seasons that cable has made so en vogue.