Editor’s Note: The Start of Something New

NEW YORK: When The CW announced last week that it will turn over its Sunday night prime-time hours to its affiliates to program, not too many industry insiders were surprised. In fact, many were expecting it.

It’s no secret that the current broadcast network model is seriously challenged, burdened by skyrocketing programming costs and threatened by declining advertising on the one hand, and by viewers fleeing to cable channels on the other.

The fact is that many TV executives, past and present, as well as industry observers, predict that The CW’s move, in one shape or another, is going to be repeated by other networks as well.

We’ve already heard of NBC giving up the 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. slot to The Jay Leno Show starting in the fall.

Fred Silverman, the network executive dubbed “the man with the golden gut” by Time magazine in the ’70s, who programmed CBS, ABC and NBC and nurtured the series All in the Family and Charlie’s Angels, just to name a few, and laid the foundation for NBC’s Must-See TV Thursday night lineup of four comedies and a drama, says NBC’s Leno move is another step toward the end of broadcast television as we know it. Silverman said this at a TV symposium held recently at his alma mater, Syracuse University. He also believes the next step will be networks giving up the 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. slot to affiliates.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Robert Thompson, professor and founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, and he concurs. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the networks, at some point in the not too distant future, giving up some of their time slots back to the affiliates, which would have seemed unthinkable 20 years ago, when they were trying to grab as much as they could from the affiliates,” he said.

If the affiliates get control of more prime-time slots and need programming, Thompson asked, “Will there be a thriving new first-run syndication explosion? Or, dare we ever dream, is there a possibility that the stations might actually go to local programming, which would be wonderful!”

So The CW, which for now is ceding Sunday night, but by the fall could also give Saturday night programming to the affiliates, may be starting a trend. The CW prefers putting all its programming eggs into the Monday to Friday programming basket, where it can concentrate on its target audience of young women, and it has been reaching them with shows like Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model.

If you look at ratings from Sunday, May 3, The CW had a 0.3/1 rating/share for the evening among Adults 18-49, according to Nielsen figures posted by TV By the Numbers. Compare that to ABC’s 3.1/9, CBS’s 2.6/8, FOX’s 2.3/7, NBC’s 2.1/6 and even Univision’s 1.0/3.

And much of what The CW has been airing Sunday nights—reruns from the libraries of its parent companies’ Warner Bros. and CBS Corp., along with old movies—is precisely the kind of fare that an affiliate station could afford to offer.

And who knows, if Professor Thompson is right, imagine a re-igniting of the U.S. syndication market. Might not that be a much-needed boost for many producers and distributors suffering through this economic downturn?