Commentary

Network Upfront Week: Selling TV The Old-Fashioned Way

Next week, much of the speech-making we will hear at the network upfronts will express the usual amazement at the fast and furious changes that are remaking television.

However, one thing has not changed: The very upfront week where these speeches will be made.

It really is amazing -- a testament to traditions that the TV business still hold dear. Among them: Getting out in front of advertisers and agencies, presenting their wares and asking for the order. It is salesmanship at its most basic, and it is done by humans, not robots.

The upfronts require human involvement and action. Humans appear onstage, including network executives, actors, actresses and late-night comedians.

Other humans watch them from the audience. These audience members have to leave their offices, arrange car services, hail cabs, hop on subways or fly in from other cities.

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True, the upfronts can be viewed via live stream from the comfort of home or workplace. But it is always more fun, if not more experiential and meaningful, to attend in person.

Attendees are therefore required to abandon their offices and cubicles and untether themselves from their desktops (although these days they are constantly checking their phones for emails and texts).

In-person attendance at the upfronts includes much eating and drinking, hobnobbing with sitcom stars, TV lawyers and cops, and Les Moonves (if you can catch him).

One of the topics of casual discussion at the upfronts between people who are otherwise unacquainted is the feigned exhaustion everyone expresses over the pace of upfront week -- at least eight of them in four days next week: NBC and Fox on Monday; ESPN, Univision and ABC on Tuesday; Turner Networks and CBS on Wednesday; and the CW on Thursday.

For journalists, there is a ninth event -- a traditional press breakfast and news conference at CBS early Wednesday morning to preview the lineup that will be formally unveiled later in the day.

This schedule has remained more or less the same for years. Yes, it can be tiring, but it is also true that covering the TV business as a journalist is a decidedly sedentary occupation, so the opportunity to actually get up and go somewhere is one that I generally look forward to each year at this time -- no matter how many years I have done this (a lot of them).

The upfronts give a journalist a chance to check in with the TV business and assess the state of the industry (or at least try to).

Understandably, all the onstage speakers will extol the virtues of their networks and other platforms in an effort to give the impression that all is rosy, that their content -- both on linear and digital -- is drawing audiences in numbers never before seen, and that their plans for producing new content in the coming year are more stupendous and colossal than the year before.

But astute observers can read between the lines to discern what the networks are really worried about. Generally speaking, it is the continuous encroachment of other forms of video entertainment that have been threatening them for years, if not decades.

Their strategy for combating this encroachment gets a public airing every year in May during upfront week. That's when the TV business gets to put its best foot forward -- and for four days at least, TV is once again the king of all media.

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