• by Ed Martin , May 13, 2011

Talk about getting in under the wire! With only five weeks to go before the end of the traditional broadcast television season -- a season that left the broadcasters without a single new hit and only a handful of modest freshman successes -- NBC served up "The Voice," a new reality competition series that is shaping up to be the network's first new significant success in years. If I'm not mistaken -- and if I may make an end run around such critical darlings and cult favorites as "30 Rock," "Chuck," "Parks and Recreation" and "Community" -- there hasn't been so much mainstream excitement surrounding a new NBC prime-time series since the debut of "Heroes" in September 2006.

At first blush it would seem that "The Voice" is a happy accident, made to premiere at the end of a season where its potential failure would do the least harm. The May sweep period was looking pretty darn awful for NBC anyway, and if "The Voice" had been a stiff, bad ratings during its final weeks in June wouldn't do very much damage in the long run. It would also seem that a new show as well-produced as "The Voice" could have been an invaluable player at the start of the traditional broadcast season or even at mid-season, arguably the most competitive period of the year. So why waste it at the last?

On second thought, however, the fact that momentum is building for "The Voice" so late in the traditional season and will likely continue to grow right through the rest of its run in June will be hugely beneficial for NBC, because that's the time that the broadcasters begin the aggressive promotion of their new fall series. That makes the late-season launch of a big hit like "The Voice" a double win, even if overall viewing levels naturally decline after the end of the May sweeps period. (Of course, if the new fall series NBC announces on Monday prove to be as lame as the shows it announced last May, all the exciting summer promotion in the world -- from on-air spots to events at Comic-Con to press conferences at the summer Television Critics Association tour -- won't do much good at all.)

Regardless, NBC may have been slogging along for longer than anyone can remember, but it's looking at a truly exciting June 2011, with the final few weeks of the season's only new hit playing out alongside the first few weeks of the summer season's most popular original series, "America's Got Talent," which premieres May 31. The potential promotional power of it all is impressive, to say the least. Now let's hope the network has something worth selling.

In the meantime, one has to wince at the current treatment of NBC's only new show in ages to have any real value. After two weeks of big ratings for two-hour episodes that ran from 9-11 p.m., "The Voice" has suddenly been condensed into one-hour episodes and shunted off to 10 p.m., a time period now known as home to some of basic cable's most popular programs and the prime-time time period of choice for DVR playback. This seems like the kind of plan a network cobbles together for a series with no traction. It is no way to treat a dynamic new show with compelling multi-generational appeal that can draw viewers of all ages at 8 or 9 p.m. If I were running NBC, I would have looked at the week-two numbers for this show and instantly moved it to 8 p.m. while pushing the aging "The Biggest Loser" to 9. Or I would have bumped "Loser" to another night and given "The Voice" a two-hour block on Tuesday.

As for the first one-hour installment of "The Voice," it was basically an hour of filler (featuring way too much voiceover by bland host Carson Daly) enveloping four "sing-offs," each between two contestants, each about 90 seconds in length, each followed by another minute or two of judges Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine agonizing over who won each "bout" and who was going home. That's about 15 minutes of good stuff - not enough to keep a viewer riveted for a full hour. (It wasn't as bad as the typical "Dancing with the Stars" results show, but still.) Whenever "The Voice" returns for its inevitable second season -- I'm thinking January -- I hope executive producer Mark Burnett will find a way to make the "sing-off" shows as fast-paced as the "blind" auditions, which made for some of the most entertaining unscripted television I have seen in quite a while.