Elizabeth Guider Reports from the L.A. Screenings

LOS ANGELES: A record-setting 1,500 foreign TV program buyers have just hit Tinseltown for the annual week-long sales bazaar known as the L.A. Screenings—and this go-round they will likely leave bowled over but definitely bleary-eyed by all they have to see.

Even if they only traipse to the six major Hollywood studios and go nowhere else they’ll be confronted with some 45 to 50 new broadcast network contenders for fall and midseason, including actioner Hostages from Jerry Bruckheimer’s stable, Josh Whedon’s comic book-inspired Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., espionage thriller The Blacklist starring James Spader, dramedy Rake toplining Greg Kinnear, The CW period piece Reign and Greg Berlanti’s The Tomorrow People.

Several mini-series will also vie for viewers’ attention starting this summer with a sci-fi-inflected mystery called Under the Dome from producer Neal Baer as well as Tom Fontana’s Billy the Kid and M. Night Shyamalan’s Wayward Pines—not to mention FOX’s recently announced reboot of the Kiefer Sutherland hit 24. Homegrown minis tend to be a mainstay on European broadcasters so the reaction to the American offerings will be interesting.

And though they don’t typically travel abroad as well (or bring home as hefty license fees), comedies galore are on offer, the majority male-targeted, and feature A-list talents as diverse as Seth Green, Sean Hayes, Michael J. Fox and Robin Williams and the apparently irrepressible Margo Martindale (The Millers).

Why this unusual plethora of new content? Because the current broadcast season has been nothing if not bruising, with cable channels and digital platforms continuing to chip away at the over-the-air audience and to command at least some of the water-cooler chit-chat.

With an unusually high number of disappointing debuts for freshmen series and unexpected fall-offs for a few established shows, the broadcast networks have spent the last few weeks slashing and burning a larger swathe of their schedules than usual. One exec said the exercise was a little like an episode from The Walking Dead—an apt analogy given how much that cable show has cut into ratings traditionally destined for the terrestrial nets. From Vegas, Golden Boy and Partners to Go On, The New Normal and Family Tools, to Smash and Body of Proof, even to long-in-the-tooth stalwarts like CSI: NY, no mercy has been shown to network shows that aren’t carrying their weight.

The cancellations translate into more holes to fill on most U.S. network skeds and more pilots for international buyers to sift through. That in itself is one of the many ironies and anomalies surrounding the Screenings: the more series a studio has to sell, the more energized its sales team; but that plethora of shows also suggests that the sister network of said studio must have faltered badly if so many slots have to be filled.

ABC, NBC and FOX all noticeably tumbled this cycle, with their average total viewerships clocking in between 6 and 7 million. Once again, CBS bested the lot with a 12 million viewer average and managing the hat trick of being tops in the three key demos—including, for the first time in 20-odd years, the coveted 18-49 ranking.

As CBS Corporation’s president and CEO, Leslie Moonves, quipped at the Eye’s upfront presentation to advertisers on Wednesday: “Don’t hold our youth against us.” The comment was an obvious jab at his competitors’ longstanding dismissals of CBS as the web for geriatrics.

Instead, the Eye has managed to capture more younger viewers than its competitors, with four out of the top five rated shows on TV and six out of the top ten. NCIS still commands an impressive 21 million eyeballs each week and The Big Bang Theory attracts 18 million.

To detractors who decry the fast-approaching demise of the broadcast biz model, Moonves had this to say: “Broadcast is not an old media. We’re the center of it all. The landscape would be barren without us.”

On the international front his argument also still resonates. Sources reckon that 80 percent of the $8 billion in annual revenues from foreign TV buyers raked in by U.S. content suppliers from abroad end up in the coffers of the six Hollywood heavyweights—Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, Disney Media Distribution, CBS Studios International, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures Television. (Also, for the first time in a decade, Sony, which does not boast a sister network but acts more like an indie supplier, is coming to the table with a half-dozen new prime-time contenders, on par now with its rivals.)

“Parties seem to be thin on the ground this year at the Screenings; we’re going to be in darkened theaters practically all the time, through next Thursday,” said one international buyer who flew in from Europe mid-week.