• by Paul Gough , January 6, 2003

There’s no stopping non-scripted TV shows, at least not yet.

Even though two monsters in the genre – Survivor: Thailand on CBS and The Bachelor on ABC – have recently ended their runs, both will be back: Survivor in mid-February and a tables-turned Bachelorette beginning this week. More are ahead: This week’s premiere of Star Search on CBS ahead of the next round of Fox’s American Idol, plus new shows like High School Reunion and Surreal Life on The WB and returning ones like last summer’s Meet My Folks on NBC.

“The American public is just gobbling this stuff up. They love it,” notes Susan Nathan, SVP/director of media knowledge at Universal McCann.

And she doesn’t see the mania running its course, at least for the time being. Any comparisons to the game show revival of the late 1990s, sparked by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, don’t bear out based on the frenetic pace of program announcements.

“You saw the implosion of game shows pretty quickly. Here, they keep coming up with new and more ridiculous ideas, even if they run only once,” Nathan said. She and others cite Joe Millionaire, the Fox show that has women vying for the attention of a faux millionaire.

The networks’ reality for non-scripted shows is simple: they’re cheap to make and they bring in an appealing target audience.

But that doesn’t mean that planners and buyers are necessarily jumping for them. Susan McClellan, national media manager at Cincinnati-based Empower Media Marketing, said her agency looks at the proposition more as who the target is and whether it makes sense for the client.

“Is it nice to have? Sure. Is it a must to have? Not really,” McClellan said.

McClellan points to the ratings for Survivor: Thailand, which are softer than earlier runs, for signs of when the non-scripted shows will run their course.

“I think it will get to the point where people couldn’t care less or it won’t be a profit center for the networks,” she said.

Nathan sees the non-scripted shows as helping the networks stem the encroachment of cable. The erosion issue has flattened out a little, she said.

Brad Adgate, SVP/director of research at New York-based Horizon Media, said NBC and CBS are pretty much where everyone thought they’d be in the ratings race: CBS leading total households and viewers and NBC ahead of the pack in the 18-49 demographic that advertisers covet.

“It does seem to be a two-network race,” Adgate said.

Other observations:

CSI, CSI:Miami and Without a Trace, all on CBS, which has helped boost CBS’ fortunes on Monday nights and break into NBC’s stranglehold on Thursday nights.

The West Wing, which had helped NBC’s 18-49 numbers, has turned south this season, dropping 25% among the demographic. Planners say the left-leaning politics portrayed on the show might be hurting it. “They don’t really reflect the real world,” said one.

NBC’s franchise Law & Order continues to do well, although Law & Order has suffered a 10% drop in viewers, probably more due to the West Wing leadout than anything else. Nathan says it’s doing well enough that NBC is replacing its Saturday night movie with two law and order repeats.

ABC is doing much better than expected. “They’re holding their own,” said Nathan. Adgate said their dramas had problems (all four new dramas were canceled by the end of 2002) but that ABC has created a couple nights of viewing with new sitcoms like 8 Simple Rules and The Bonnie Hunt Show.

With the exception of 24, American Idol and the continued strength of The Simpsons, Fox hasn’t been struggling. The quick death of Girls Club and other new programs has hit Fox hard. “They’ve had a pretty tough time,” Adgate said.

A bright spot: The WB. Smallville, Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek and Everwood have surpassed expectations, and have made the failure of shows like Bird of Prey and Family Affair much more palatable.

Beyond the end of the traditional TV season, many see the networks starting to think like cable, which has always focused on the summer as a way to make hay against the networks. Fox did that last year to high ratings for American Idol. Adgate predicts that will happen again this year, although it’s too soon to tell how it will play out yet.

“I think networks are starting to pay attention to the summer months. They realize they can get a lot of buzz and create an attractive platform to market their fall shows,” he said.