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Cable TV Is Having Breakout Summer
Cable television has always feasted on the summer audiences abandoned by the largely vacationing broadcast networks, but this season has been a spectacularly good one.
A host of cable channels have generated significant successes with original shows this summer, mainly hourlong dramas like “The Closer” and “Saving Grace” on TNT; “Army Wives” on Lifetime; “Burn Notice” on USA; “Damages” on FX; and “Mad Men” on the most unlikely channel, AMC.
All these shows, many of which have been critically acclaimed as well as popular with viewers, have emerged on basic cable, not a premium channel like HBO.
If that seems like a trend, some cable executives are bold enough to claim even more. “We’re at the tipping point,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment, which has the season’s most-watched dramas in “The Closer” and “Saving Grace.”
“It’s our belief that we and the other basic cable networks can begin matching the broadcast networks series for series,” he added. “It’s only a matter of time before we have as many big hits as they do.”
Obviously the definition of a hit remains different for cable. “The Closer,” now in its third season, drew 8.8 million viewers for its season premiere, a number that any network would lust after in the summer — and find more than acceptable any time of year.
But big network hits still attract double or even triple that audience. Broadcasters have also had a notably weak season, as their cost-savings strategy of filling hours with reality series has been mostly a bust. No network reality series has broken out, as many have in recent summers.
Still, the basic cable channels are getting noticed. Steve McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, said last month that given the performance of the cable dramas, he would begin to consider doing more scripted shows in the summer.
HBO has made less noise with its new summer shows, but the channel still gets most credit for shaping the cable strategy. “HBO was so influential in setting the standard for quality serialized drama,” said John Landgraf, the president of FX.
He contended that his channel raised the ante when it introduced “The Shield” in 2002 — a show that invaded HBO turf by winning Emmys — and followed that with other critical and popular successes like “Nip/Tuck” and “Rescue Me.”
They proved, Mr. Langraf said, that high-quality original shows could be done on smaller budgets, and that they could establish identities for cable channels.
The shows also proved that quality writers and actors would work for the channels, not just networks or HBO. Matt Nix only wrote movies before creating “Burn Notice,” a show about the exploits of ex-spies. USA’s president, Bonnie Hammer, said she had renewed the show for a second season, just after learning that its audience grew last week to 4.4 million.
“I thank God for cable every day,” Mr. Nix said. “Cable is really about identifying a segment of an audience and then really going after that audience with everything they’ve got.”
One key to the success of these dramas is that they have been introduced one at a time, with all the marketing force each channel can muster.
Matt Weiner has experienced that at AMC with “Mad Men,” his drama about advertising agencies around 1960. Having spent the past seven years writing for television’s most honored show, “The Sopranos,” Mr. Weiner said he was surprised and delighted by the creative freedom AMC offered him.
For AMC “Mad Men” fit a strategy to rebrand a network that is known primarily for classic films. Charlie Collier, the executive vice president of AMC, said the plan was to find “iconic shows that could play next to the iconic movies we’re known for.”
“Mad Men” had been a finished script for years. Mr. Weiner said, when he got a call “out of nowhere” that AMC was interested, he first thought the offer might be leverage to get a deal at HBO. But once he heard AMC’s plans for the show, “I said to myself, this is where I want to be.”
“Mad Men,” which has received the kind of rave reviews usually reserved for HBO series, has improved AMC’s ratings for its Thursday-night time period by more than 100 percent. But as Mr. Weiner put it, “I think those reviews were 90 percent of the business plan.”
Lifetime has had a similar result with its new drama “Army Wives”; the show has already become the biggest hit in the channel’s history. “We had to find shows that people could not see elsewhere,” Susanne Daniels, the president of entertainment at Lifetime, said, adding that she has ordered a second season of 18 episodes.
That is a high number of episodes for a renewal. Most cable series do not make more than 13 episodes, for economic reasons. The shows have budgets about a third less than the broadcast-network levels of $2 million to $3 million an episode. Savings are achieved, Ms. Hammer said, mainly by “staying within certain parameters” on production elements like casting and location shooting, and by sticking to seven-day shooting schedules.
Not all shows restrict casting. Some big stars have signed on, including Holly Hunter on “Saving Grace,” the TNT show about a police detective with a rocky personal life, and Glenn Close on “Damages,” the FX series about a high-powered lawyer. TNT said on Wednesday it was renewing “Saving Grace” for a second season of 15 episodes.
Mr. Nix said one other advantage the summer cable series have enjoyed is a greater availability of actors and directors. “It’s a godsend to be shooting mainly when the other shows are off,” he said.
Given this summer’s successes, where does basic cable go from here? Some networks are looking at the period from January to March. FX has already moved in with “Nip/Tuck” and new shows like “The Riches.” TNT and USA executives are talking about expanding original programming into those months.
Mr. Landgraf of FX, though, cautioned that “it’s much more difficult to sustain these shows than it is to break one out.”
And he raised a more basic point for the basic cable channels: “One of the challenges everyone faces is, are there more quality shows than the audience can humanly watch?”
