Posted on 06/22/2005 9:55:22 AM PDT by My Favorite Headache
ESPN gets less sports-centered Cabler to broaden its field with more series, telepix
By JOHN DEMPSEY
Less hockey and baseball. More original movies and series. That's one big equation on the mind of Mark Shapiro, executive VP of programming and production for ESPN, who's gung ho about broadening the audience for ESPN by reaching beyond the stereotypical potbellied sports nut, stretched out in his undershirt on a Barcalounger with a can of beer in one hand and a remote in the other.
ESPN and ESPN2 aimed the National Hockey League games it carried from 1999 through 2004 squarely at this viewer, but Shapiro says the NHL's ratings had fallen to such a depressed state by the 2003-04 season (a labor dispute obliterated the 2004-05 schedule) that he won't pay cash license fees anymore.
And Shapiro is negotiating a new contract with Major League Baseball but says, "I'm not interested in carrying five games a week unless I get full network exclusivity," a concession baseball seems unwilling to grant except for the traditional ESPN game of the week on Sunday night.
And that's where scripted programming comes in. Shapiro says one of the reasons ESPN's scripted series about Las Vegas poker players "Tilt" failed to find an audience earlier this year is that the only free night not saturated with live sports commitments was Thursday, where, at 9 p.m., the show had to go up against such strong series as "CSI" on CBS, "Will & Grace" on NBC and "Extreme Makeover" on ABC. Against those odds, "Tilt" never really had a chance.
By contrast, ESPN's other scripted series "Playmakers," a warts-and-all look at the members of a fictional pro-football team, fared much better with audiences in 2003's late summer and fall because the network was able to carve out a weekly primetime slot on Tuesday, where the competition was not so fierce.
Despite solid ratings, "Playmakers" got a reluctant cancellation notice after its first 13-episode season, falling victim to the hostility of the National Football League, most of whose owners hated the portrayal of some athletes as drug users, wife beaters and other unsavory types.
The mistakes ESPN made in shepherding "Playmakers" and "Tilt" onto the schedule have only reinforced Shapiro's goal of coming up with one or two hit series in the next few years and with at least four highly exploitable original movies a year, starting in 2006.
The man who created "Playmakers," John Eisendrath, is working on an untitled drama pilot set in the world of boxing, which is slated as ESPN's next series.
Shapiro says he has 30 movie projects in the works, with two in production: "Four Minutes," a docudrama about Roger Bannister, the first athlete to run the four-minute mile, and "The Code Breakers," a script based on the 1951 West Point scandal in which the school expelled 83 Army cadets, including most of the football team, for cheating.
Sports-media consultant Kevin O'Malley applauds Shapiro's push to get ESPN into scripted movies and series.
"These shows are already getting more women and younger men to watch the network," O'Malley says.
Getting different kinds of people to watch ESPN, says Neal Pilson, a sports consultant and former president of CBS Sports, will help to pump up the network's advertising revenues.
Kagan Research says ESPN already harvests more ad revenues than any other cable network, projecting a record $869.2 million in 2005, a 9% gain over those of last year.
ESPN should look at the example of MTV, says David Carter, a principal with the Los Angeles-based Sports Business Group.
"MTV became an integral part of the pop culture," he says, "by morphing from a musicvideo network to a channel carrying a wide range of programming."
However, Mike Trager, former head of Clear Channel Entertainment, says ESPN "has to walk a fine line between reaching out for new viewers and alienating its core audience."
Or, as another sports analyst puts it: "Women may watch an episode of one of the series, but that doesn't mean they're going to abandon Lifetime to become devotees of the NFL and the NBA on ESPN."
No way. Stewart Scott is now completely insufferable.
What it comes down to is simple economics at the end of the day. ESPN can sell these original programs to other networks and put them on DVD and make millions in revenue. They put the season of Tilt on DVD and it sold like hotcakes for some reason,although the show essentially sucked.
The same thing with "3" The Dale Earnhardt Story,they put that out on DVD and also gave rights to SPIKE-TV to air it as well. Tens of millions of dollars.
Have you ever gotten lost in the gaze of Stuart Scott's lazy eye?
WRONG!! "Tilt" failed because it sucks. Period.
Can't say that I have.
I think their problem is the exact opposite, not enough live sports events. Even if there is nothing on, I'd like to watch old world series games, etc...
Who wants to see more fruity soap-operas? I don't care if theyre about sports.
No music on MTV
No sports on ESPN
No classic television on TV Land
Sad future of cable broadcasting
Television executives are an insufferable lot that know as much about TV programming as I do about brain surgery.
What the heck are they talking about? Good baseball teams get good ratings. The (GO!) Red Sox vs. (Evil) Yankees game that open the season was got some of the best ratings in ESPN history.
The desire to attract female view is not surprising, since nearly all of television has been given over to women.
I can see filling time with sportscasts and such at odd hours, but to run it instead of a live sports events is ludicrous. If I want talking heads and hollywood garbage, i'd watch all the other channels.
Time to switch to Sirius or XM.
No kidding - ESPN has become just another leftist repository. Their sports news shows tend to feature liberal-activism type stories more and more. They dwell on the stupidest non-sports stuff increasingly. They now want to insult their core audience and become like MTV? Fine, I have NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Extra Innings, and the internet for news, and thus don't need them. It's too bad what has happened to the once-great and groundbreaking network though. Once again, liberalism destroys something good.
Couldn't they just start ESPN/Lifetime? "Original" crap programming alternating with sports-themed chick-flix like "A League of their Own" and "Bull Durham". If they want to go after the bulldyke WNBA demographic, fine. Just don't expect real sports fans to follow.
But there are times when I can begin to understand what Dee Brown is trying to enunciate. However, most of the time I need to mute it and let the caption fill me in.
I like the Trifecta at night, though.
Yep.TV LAND has gone the way of VH1 and gotten into all of these "celebreality" Top 10 this Top 100 that programming ad nauseum.
Oh yeah and the TV Land Awards...quite possibly the gayest thing ever put on TV next to Cop Rock?
And the women's college softball world series (which filled the TV slots originally reserved for the NHL playoffs) drew higher ratings than last year's hockey playoff games. The rights to women's college softball are a lot cheaper than the rights to the NHL.
Me.
You mean Baywatch isn't classic tv.;)
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