PBS is re-evaluating its public affairs lineup to make room for new series and to inoculate Frontline against audience losses.
For the fall season, PBS will move Frontline back to Tuesday nights, away from tough network competition on Thursdays, where it has aired for three years. PBS announced the switch, and its plans to retool Now with Bill Moyers as a half-hour series, during the Public Television Programmers' Association Conference in Atlanta last month. PBS has said Now, which will lose Moyers as host when he retires after the elections, will be followed by Tucker Carlson's new half-hour series, Unfiltered, developed with CPB and PBS support to counterbalance Moyers politically.
Acknowledging concerns among station programmers that the influx of new public affairs series has contributed to declines in PBS's cumulative audience, Co-Chief Programmer John Wilson made the case for continuing Now, while testing station programmers' interest in moving some public affairs series out of primetime to Sunday daytime slots.
Frontline will stay put in primetime, however. PBS hopes to reverse the investigative series' recent audience losses by rescheduling it at 9 p.m. Tuesdays, following Nova. The documentary series' audience has declined 40 percent since moving to Thursday nights, slippage that outpaces PBS's own general audience loss in primetime, Wilson said. C.S.I. and ER, top-rated series among college-educated viewers, are drawing viewers away, he added.
Before signing off on the schedule change, PBS asked WGBH to secure commitments from major market stations to air Frontline at 9 p.m., Wilson said.
Many outlets push Frontline back to 10 p.m., and PBS didn't want to shift the schedule if stations didn’t back the day change with the better timeslot. WGBH persuaded "the vast majority of stations in the top 30 markets" to keep the show at 9 o'clock, he added.
"We're very pleased about it," said David Fanning, Frontline executive producer, of the schedule change. Before PBS sent it to Thursdays, Frontline drew more viewers than the network's primetime average, he said. "We think the program deserves a bigger audience."
Less is more for Brancaccio
Wilson signaled bigger changes ahead for public affairs series airing on Friday nights. Now with Bill Moyers, which debuted in January 2002 as an hourlong series covering post-9/11 America , will relaunch as a half-hour without Moyers in January. David Brancaccio, now Moyers' co-host, will headline the reformatted show.
Now is TV for the 21st century, Wilson told programmers. "It makes news. It's paced but not frenetic. It's topical but not sensational, and it has developed a following--sometimes the largest following on a given Friday."
"We believe it's important to give someone like David a chance to develop, to grow into what could become a bigger role in years to come," Wilson added. He also named Carlson, whose series debuts in June, and new talk show host Tavis Smiley as members of PBS’s new generation of public affairs talent.
Brancaccio joked that as host of public radio's Marketplace, he had only 28 minutes and 45 seconds of airtime. "I'll have a whole half-hour," he said. Brancaccio, who attended the PTPA conference with Now producing execs John Siceloff and Judy Doctoroff, said he's honored to address Now's "smart, critically minded audience."
Brancaccio will do more field reporting in the new format, "engaging in conversations with people outside of the studios," said Siceloff. The show will include a "variety of voices," though hiring decisions about additional talent are months off.
Now's audience grew 30 percent in the 2002-03 season, Siceloff said. Stations in three top markets — Los Angeles, Boston and Dallas — have posted audience gains for Now by scheduling it as the lead-in of the Friday public affairs block, according to TRAC Media Services, the research firm that serves as PTPA's secretariat.
Now ignited passions among viewers of WILL in Urbana, Ill. — “either because of or despite it being a conservative area,” said David Thiel, p.d. Acknowledging that some viewers pushed to "silence Moyers” and liberal view points, Thiel asked PBS execs to ensure that the series “retains the kind of focus it's had and will still be edgy and a little strong and out there.”
Executive Producer Siceloff has been with the series from the beginning and “he is not going anywhere,” said Coby Atlas, co-chief programmer. When Brancaccio hosted pubradio's Marketplace, he demonstrated he could deliver a program “with a real edge to it,” she added. “So I don't anticipate that going away.”
Waiting for Gigot
Another program with a right-ward edge may also join PBS’s expanded public affairs lineup. CPB is discussing a new series from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which is edited by Paul Gigot, a former pundit on PBS's NewsHour. “Despite the fact that we are not a funder, we stand a better chance of influencing the outcome by agreeing to bring it into the schedule,” Wilson said.
“We think we should discuss how we should schedule these programs,” Wilson said, referring to the series in PBS’s Friday public affairs block. “Surely there are other dayparts where the audience size and inclination are better suited to this kind of program. Sunday daytime comes to mind immediately.”
PBS can’t move shows from Friday to Sunday without “a near universal commitment from all of you,” Wilson added. “We’ll never convince underwriters that going from primetime to daytime isn’t a downgrade unless carriage is as good as it is on Friday nights.”
Wilson did not name the series that are candidates for the switch, but the Friday block includes Washington Week, Wall Street Week with Fortune and Now, plus Carlson's show that begins in June. Only the W's and Now are designated by PBS for common carriage.
Talks about the Friday revamp are preliminary, Atlas said, and PBS won’t pursue it unless “all the programmers tell us what a good idea it is.”
She added another caveat: “We would only do it if we could do something
completely different on Fridays.”
Web page posted May 11, 2004
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