Jonathan Storm: Peacock looking plucked as NBC cancels shows

The Peacock is looking like a bedraggled starling at the start of its first fall TV season in Comcast's nest.

Three weeks in, overall viewership, according to the Nielsen Co., is up at CBS and Fox, and down less than 1 percent at ABC, vs. year-ago numbers.

But at NBC, it's down 6 percent.

More ominous: Despite a new entertainment boss and a large bump in spending on program development, NBC has seen the average viewership of its five new series drop a stunning 28 percent from levels achieved by last year's five new series in the first three weeks of the season.

Every single new 2010-11 show had higher numbers than comparable ones this year, yet not one of them proved strong enough to be renewed for 2011-12.

NBC has already canceled two of its new series, and a third, Prime Suspect, starring Norristown native Maria Bello, is on the ropes. The network has ordered full seasons of two other comedies, even though the more-watched one, Whitney, ranks 58th among 80 big-network series.

CBS's new How to Be a Gentleman, 14 clicks higher on the viewership list with 8.3 million viewers, would be just behind creaky Law & Order: SVU on NBC as the No. 3-ranked scripted series. At CBS, it's headed for cancellation city.

All is not lost at NBC. Advertisers pay attention to total viewership, where NBC does not have a top-40 show other than football, but ratings in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic are more important, and NBC does a little better there. The Office, for instance, is ranked No. 18 on that scale.

"NBC is slicing and dicing the Nielsen data a lot of different ways," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president and director of research at Horizon Media, a New York media-services agency.

On Tuesday, for instance, Harry's Law, the network's most-watched scripted show, got an order for six additional scripts, despite its relatively old audience. Network execs were encouraged by a whiff of strength in the show among DVR users.

"Whitney may have only 5.7 million viewers," Adgate said, "but the other side is that the audience has a large percentage of young men, not heavy viewers of TV, that advertisers want to reach."

The network's entire Thursday night comedy block, (Community, Parks & Recreation, The Office, and Whitney) and its Sunday night football programming attract a disproportionate number of men.

In some ways, NBC has become a niche network, getting advertisers to pay extra for that higher percentage of young men, just as the little CW does with its audience of young women, even though the No. 4 Peacock averages more than 5 million fewer prime-time viewers than No. 1 CBS.

"Cable's putting out really good-quality niche product, too," said Noah Everist, broadcast supervisor in the Compass Point Media unit of the Minneapolis ad agency Campbell Mithun, "and people are going there."

Comcast doesn't need NBC to be another cable network. It picked up a bucket of those, and very successful ones, too, including USA and Bravo, when it shelled out $13.8 billion to take control of NBCUniversal in January.

Regulators and industry watchdogs were worried that the huge cable company would continue cost-cutting instituted by NBC's previous owner, General Electric, that gutted the network's prime-time audience.

But Comcast poured more than $100 million, by reliable estimates, into program development and hired one of television's most respected entertainment executives, Bob Greenblatt, to turn things around. Greenblatt is credited with helping to move Fox into the big time in the '90s, and with making Showtime a viable creative competitor with HBO in the last few years.

Things look dark at the moment, but Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University and professor of popular culture, sees the possibility of a brighter future.

He likes the big programming investment. "The way you find good programming is really inefficient development," he said. "You have no idea which the good ones are . . . . It often takes making a bunch of mistakes before you find them."

"There's hope for NBC," he said. "All one has to do is look back to its own history. NBC was a distant third at the beginning of the 1980s . . . . People had NBC written off. Then they got The A-Team, and The Cosby Show came along, and it started this incredible reign of comedy.

"It takes a couple of hits. That can happen really quickly."

NBC is losing about $500 million annually, people with knowledge of its finances estimate, primarily because of its weak prime-time lineup. Comcast wants to stop the bleeding, and it wants to boost profits at NBC-owned stations by delivering a strong prime-time audience for their 11 p.m. news shows.

But image is perhaps more important to a corporation that has annual revenue of $3.3 billion. "NBC's prime-time lineup is its public face," Craig Moffett, an analyst with the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, said last spring when the network was preparing to unveil its fall schedule. "Comcast won't get full credit for its purchase until the Peacock climbs out of the cellar."

Neither Greenblatt nor NBCUniversal President and CEO Steve Burke would comment for this article, but if they had, they surely would have chanted the programming mantra that TV is a marathon, not a sprint, and they would have pointed out that most of the struggling new fall shows started in development before Greenblatt joined the company.

"In fairness to Bob Greenblatt," Adgate said, "he did get the nod sometime in the middle. How much of these shows are his fingerprinting, and how much not, is hard to say. Next year, you can definitely say this is his vision, and the direction he wants to take."

Before next year, there is buzz about NBC's mid-season shows. "Smash and Awake are different and creative," said Everist, echoing the views of many TV critics. They are intrigued by Awake, in which a policeman occupies parallel worlds after a devastating auto accident. In one, his wife is still alive. In the other, it's his son who survived.

The sophisticated Smash, a sort of Glee for grown-ups, about the mounting of a Broadway musical focusing on Marilyn Monroe, could be a game-changer, with a group of name performers, including Anjelica Huston, Debra Messing, Nick Jonas, Bernadette Peters, and American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee.

It's currently set to premiere Feb. 6, following the return of last spring's popular singing competition, The Voice, but the way things are going this fall, that may not be soon enough.

"I'd suggest they try to get Smash and/or Awake out as soon as possible," Everist said, "so people could add some NBC shows to their viewing lives."