Emmys 2004

It's Emmy night, putting the final cap on the 2003-04 television season. So whom do I think will be the big winners tonight? I don't really give a **##!!#. See, practically all of my favorite shows from last season either went off the air or got canceled - one canceled after only a single season - and the 2004-05 TV lineup is mostly - how shall I diplomatically put it? - uninspiring. But I still plan to check out shows like "Listen Up," and with "Two And a Half Men" featuring Sean Penn and Elvis Costello as guest stars on tomorrow night's season premiere, well , maybe I ought to give that show a second chance!

The Harper brothers are still twerps, though. . . .

Anyway, an article in Entertainment Weekly, which polled an anonymous group of TV insiders on various questions, caught my attention for this question the magazine asked their secret panel; they were asked which network was on the decline, and you'd think ABC would get the most votes. After all, the network is in fourth place, they've mishandled and canceled shows with the potential to be solid hits, the two executives who executed ABC's failed strategy to emphasize more sitcoms in the last season got fired after ABC ended up in an even bigger hole than in the season before, they brought back "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" after people stopped caring about it completely, they thoroughly botched Drew Carey's sitcom by ignoring it and letting its ratings slide, they could lose Jennifer Garner to the movies, and the only ABC freshman sitcom from last year that's back this year is "Hope and Faith," a sitcom based on the perverse idea that what Americans need is more of Kelly Ripa.

But no. NBC got the most votes, despite its solid second-place showing in the Neilsens. Why? Because most of their successful shows are aging and viewers have been finding most of their new shows, umm, underwhelming. I can't argue with that. Let's break down the evidence:

NBC hasn't produced a successful sitcom since "Will & Grace" debuted in 1997.

One-hour shows like "Freaks and Geeks" have been sabotaged to allow NBC room to air a different roster of shows, only to have the move blow up in their faces - remember their 2000-01 season's Monday night disaster, where every new show on that night debuted at the beginning of October and were all gone by the end of the month?

A one-hour show that succeeded, "Ed," was mishandled later and allowed to wither in the ratings before getting prematurely canceled.

NBC president Jeff Zucker placed greater emphasis on "reality shows," allowing the Peacock Network to coast in the Neilsens but also allowing them to ignore the erosion of the rest of their lineup.

"Friends" and "Frasier" are gone, and there are only two new sitcoms on NBC this season - one a critically hated animated series about Siegfried and Roy's menagerie. Some of their aging dramas are in trouble, and the only person who seems to enjoy "The West Wing" anymore is me!

And, of course, they don't have any NFL games.

Plus, here's some new evidence, which has come out since this Entertainment Weekly feature, that NBC is going to relive the Fred Silverman era of the late seventies and early eighties, when their progamming was so bad an albatross seemed to be a better mascot than a peacock. The Nielsens for the past two weeks are in and, quite frankly, John Kerry is doing better in the polls by comparison. "Father of the Pride," the aforementioned Siegfried and Roy show, has aroused little if any interest in viewers, Donald Trump's reality show "The Apprentice" has started with its second edition with lukewarm ratings, and the "Friends" spinoff "Joey" has gotten shockingly low ratings for a new sitcom, especially considering that it's built around a character people have known and loved for a decade. Their new dramas haven't exactly drawn folks to the small screen in droves either. And all of these shows were heavily promoted during NBC's commercially successful Olympics broadcasts, so it's not like people know about NBC's lineup for the fall.

It's still early in the season, of course, and NBC might be able to prosper by allowing its new shows to develop an audience, plus there are always mid-season replacements. But not all of these new shows will succeed, obviously, and NBC's increasing reliance on reality shows will backfire if people get sick of reality programming altogether (which, unfortunately, hasn't happened yet). ABC, meanwhile, is hungrier and more willing to take chances, while NBC has been way too cautious of late, sticking with the tried-and-true. This is not how Brandon Tartikoff and Grant Tinker rescued NBC from the Silverman era. If NBC keeps playing it safe, they will be in for a rude awakening.

Kind of like John Kerry.