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TCA — ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson says his network needs to continue taking programming risks despite the economic downturn and plans a robust development slate for the fall.
McPherson told critics at the winter press tour that he plans to shoot 10 comedy and drama pilots for next season.
“We have to take swings at the plate, and we still have to be bold,” he says, noting the shows that have worked best for the network such as “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” creatively broke new ground. “We want to grow our brand and built off the success we have. … I don’t want to do a total departure and do CBS-like shows.”
The entertainment president also criticized Nielsen, saying the ratings measurement company contracted by networks doesn't take into account enough forms of audience viewing.
“We’re talking about a different world now,” says McPherson, whose network, like most broadcasters this season, has lost viewers.
”It’s not just people sitting at a single television at home," he says. "We have to get as much of that viewership measured as possible. Anything in hotels; anything in bars. I mean, there's tons and tons of television that is watched that is not counted. When we get our fast nationals, it is not in there."
A critic notes that Nielsen has recently added college students to its database, and asked how attentive McPherson thought viewers in bars really are.
"You know what, in watching sports, I think they would be unbelievably attentive," he says. "I think in a hotel people are unbelievably attentive."
Later, McPherson adds, "[Audiences are] watching on their iPods, on their phones … and to me we have to get as much of that viewership measured as possible because you want to make sure that we all know what we're reaching so that we can reach them better and understand what they're really compelled by and attracted to and what they are not."
McPherson says he is “pleased” about NBC’s decision to cede 10 p.m. dramas and air a Jay Leno talk show instead.
“We think it opens up beachfront real estate to less bidders,” he says. “For [CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler] and I, we have different brands so we’re both looking at it and excited that there are viewers who have been left by the wayside that we can take advantage of.”
Critics asked about the fates of Wednesday night dramas “Dirty Sexy Money” and “Pushing Daisies,” which were knocked prematurely off the schedule last year because of the strike and returned to fatally low ratings.
“I really loved the shows. The producers delivered what they promised,” he says. “For us it was a frustration that we couldn’t get a larger audience – or that Nielsen says we couldn’t get a larger audience.”
McPherson adds that ABC still wants to make remaining episodes of both shows available, though producers were not able to craft satisfying series finales.
“We’ve like to air the ending of those shows,” he says. “I wish we had been able to give the producers series-ending notice so they could really have a finale.”
After the panel, McPherson says the network hopes to put the episodes online.
Mike Judge's unscheduled animated comedy "The Goode Family" is still on track for a midseason rollout, McPherson says, though may debut as late as May. McPherson confirmed ABC will not pick up Judge's last animated series, Fox's canceled "King of the Hill," as a companion.
Asked about the performance of transplanted comedy “Scrubs” so far,McPherson says he’s generally pleased, yet that it’s too early to drawany conclusions.
“We saw one week with no competition and another week with the biggest competition you can have (‘American Idol’),” he says.
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Complete Winter TCA Press Tour coverage
Note: The Live Feed blog is published by The Hollywood Reporter, which is owned by Nielsen Business Media
Inserting strident politics into entertainment irritates people. They want entertainment not a soap box lecture. As for TV news just the facts and all the facts.
Does this make me a troll?
ABC is hurting because a lot people do not like their leftist/socialist bias. They need to stick to quality programming and report the news in an honest and truthful way and leave their personal bias at home when they go to work.
WHAAAAAAAAA, I want my Mommy, they are not playing fair Boo Hoo. How much does this guy get paid for this kind of answer? How bout looking in the mirror – Network TV Stinks!! No Original content, They steal each others ideas and a boat load of Reality Crap!! Gee I wonder why ratings are down and their Liberal Stand have turned off many viewers – Not to hard to figure out from my view point, but hey what do I know I’m only the customer you Dumb A$$
There’s NOTHING on. How many CSI shows are we up to? Eleven? How many Lawer, or Doctor shows? Wife Swappers, Super Nanny, Survivor, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, The Biggest Loser. Deal or No Deal? Can HOWIE be any Creepier Looking? I got the Discovry Package, from my Cable Rip Off Joint, so that I could watch the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the Learning Channel. I wanted to see shows on ROME, and EGYPT. Alexander the Great, and the Trojan War. NOT Ice Road Truckers. NOT Lumberjacks. NOT GLOBAL WARMING GARBAGE. I wanted to LEARN things, on the LEARNING Channel. I got people DECORATING rooms. I got people RE-DECORATING Houses. I got ‘This Old House’ on steroids. I wanted to DISCOVER things. I wanted to watch shows on the Beginnings of Life, on the Universe, on New Technologies and new Medical Techniques. I got ‘Man vs. Wild. I got ‘Dirty Jobs’. I got Everything BUT. So don’t blame ‘Nielson’. Television SUCKS. The accumulation of 40 years of the Public Education System dumbing everybody DOWN, shows, on our television screens. Thank God, for Video.
Television is the sewage of western civilization washing up into your living room… fortunately the remedy is easy: turn it off
ONly watch about 1 or 2 programs on the Networks a week. And that’s when I want to be able to catch a nap,the programs are so boring.
Couldn’t agree more, Joe T.
Bachelor stays, Daisies goes? Are you serious? This network hasn’t got a clue. Our household watched only one network show for the past two years, and that was Pushing Daisies. Bye-bye ABC, keep pandering to the dimwitted and enjoy your position as the number 4 network in what should be a 3 horse race.
USA and SciFi, are you listening? As Ned might do, touch this show once and never touch it again, and it’ll stay alive. Watch and see.
It couldn’t be poor programming or mismanagement that caused it. His democrat/liberal mind, what there is of it, tells him it just has to be someone else’s fault. Typical democrat/liberal thinking.
What happened to the good old days when a family could watch tv together? What happened to Tim Taylor, Danny Tanner, Carl Winslow, Cliff Huxtable? Now it’s all sex, violence, etc. The kids have Disney Channel or Nickelodeon and adults have the shows. There’s little for the family to sit and enjoy together.
What McPherson does not understand is that most Americans do not want to be persuaded by the programs they watch…they want to be entertained. There’s always a leftest message trying to get you to feel a certain way about a certain subject…I mean if I want propaganda…I’ll watch the news.
What happened to the Everybody Loves Raymond type of sitcom…holsum, funny, something the whole family could relate to.
What happened to just reporting the news no matter how it makes either side look…you folks have the whole country believing one side walks on water and the other will drown you. When you should be the watch dogs you were meant to be and let a person know the truth no matter how it makes ALL of them look.
I’ll tell you what you lost and you lost more of it than ratings…you’ve lost INTEGREDITY Mr. McPherson…clean it up…you know most of us have families and we want our kids to stay in the room and watch the program with us…we don’t want to watch a bunch of horny people in a bar talking about how horny they are. GOT IT!!!!
Lost is still excellent, but it’s got an expiration date. Also, the predatory timeslot changes and the likelihood of premature cancellations certainly keep people from investing in shows in the first place. The difficulty in “catching up” on Pushing Daisies (no season 1 episodes on abc.com) and the spectre of an untimely demise kept us away, though it looked good from what I saw of it. Lower those bars to entry, embrace inexpensive downloads or free online viewing in more than an experimental way, cultivate a fan-friendly reputation and you’ll build audiences and program loyalty.
Who cares? All of TV sucks. It is an absolute waste of a human life to spend it sitting in front of the idiot box.
“…report the news in an honest and truthful way”
lol, what planet are you on? Americans aren’t interested in the truth, or anything even approaching the truth. We live in a COMPLETE fantasy world, the whole english-speaking world does. See “Narcissism” for more info.
The more time you spend in front of the TV the less time you have to live. TV zombies waste huge chunks of their life sitting in front of the boob tube cussing about the state of things. Most all of the information disseminated by TV is either wrong or an outright lie. If you throw your TV into the trash, your children will grow up to be much better people. The stars in the sky beat the stars on TV by an infinitely large margin. For the price of a average TV you could get a fantastic telescope which offers programming that no TV show can even compare with.
I thought everything was Bush’s fault. Was Nielsen in his cabinet?
follow the money
McPherson’s expression is 100% at odds with his upbeat spin. He looks terribly worried in that picture. Probably afraid his career is down the tubes…
Yea, let’s blame the neilson ratings, you are a fool, they are the very people who decide what we want to watch in the first place. They were created so that you could judge how well YOUR programs were doing you knucklehead. CEO’s are sometimes the biggest bunch of idiots I have ever seen.
Erik, Ol’ Pedro is just practicing some tongue in cheek sarcasm. Everybody know this whole thing is a jerk off. A lot of sheeple need to be stroked, so I do it with a wire brush. Most of them don’t even know it’s happening.
They don’t have Neilson in prisons either! Talk about a captive audience.
You’d think the guy was talking about finding a cure for cancer. Ya’ get the impression this guy takes his so-called entertainment a bit too seriously?
I don’t know how the Nielsons work these days, but if they aren’t measuring online viewing, they’d be missing me a lot. That being said, the network can only blame itself for a lot of the problem. I strayed from network programming years ago. I watch lots of History and Discovery. Hated garbage like Survivor, Bachelor, etc. I also got spoiled with networks like USA that would run a show several times so I didn’t have to schedule around the TV or remember to set a VCR. If I missed SVU on NBC, it reran on USA during the week. Since I was watching L&O reruns and SVU on USA, I discovered and got hooked on Monk, then psych, Burn Notice, etc. Through USA reruns I also rediscovered House, which I had watched a time or two but had not liked when it first started on Fox. Now it’s on my must watch list. Watching House I discovered Bones, which I had also never heard of. It’s viral. (I also don’t worry too much about the TV schedule anymore except to know when new shows will be running, because I can watch online on hulu, Fancast, etc. whenever and wherever it’s convenient for me with fewer commercials. I also use that to catch up on series that I find along the way and want to catch up on.) Why do I go into all this? Because before these posts, I NEVER HEARD OF ELI STONE. So Mr. McPherson, the key in today’s world is 1. make good shows (like many of the posters here, shows pushing a one-sided political agenda will turn me off) and 2. get exposure for them in places where people are actually watching. The ratings should follow.
Network tv sucks cuz they don’t do comedy anymore. Back in the day, shows like Seinfeld, friends, and the simpsons used to be awesome. The only reason to watch networks now is football and Maury paternity tests. For comedy they can’t compete with south park, the soup, aquateen hungerforce, oreilly factor – all hilarious, all on cable.
Plus network reality like the bachelor and survivor can’t compete with cable reality like shot at love and the island. Maybe if networks start targeting people under 30 they could become relevant again.
I cannot believe that the goof at ABC is whining about iPod, cell phone and bar viewers are not being counted by Neilsen. In a bar, you watch sports, period. If you watch tv programs on your iPod or phone, you are braindead, have absolutely no life, probably live at home with your mother and don’t have money to spend on the advertisers’ products. So, who cares?
He should worry about the buckets of dung that the networks throw at us as the reason the ratings are tanking. The only show that I watch on ABC is “Lost”.
Poor ABC! Another crappy company wanting to blame their misfortunes on everyone else. Sounds to me like they are positioning themsleves for a run at some bailout money….
We haven’t watched the Big Four networks for years–except for sport events(and I usually MUTE them). Their news reports do not reflect our political views or for anyone else that we know. I’m not sure a TV executive would recognize a real writer if one were to step on his toes. Our grandkids could write better stuff that what passes as dialogue in 99% of the shows on now.
How about “THE VIEW”???? 4 liberals to one little conservative. Did you see their treatment of Ann Coulter or anyone else they deem to be not-like them? Liberals are total facists.
Agreed. BL was the last “drop everything, I’m watching my show” utill they started pushing their activist agenda. No thanks. I’ve discovered more important things to do with my time.
Yeah, how about “THE VIEW”??? That show has four liberals to one conservative. They treat anyone who doesn’t share their liberal view with total contempt. Plus whoopie is just yukkie. Take a bath, girl!
On the positive side, the decadence of American culture (and its funhouse mirror: television) acts as a stimulant to healthy masculine instinct, which is one of the reasons young American men are so in love with violence (MMA etc). It’s an instinctive reaction. Just go to youtube and see how young American men conduct themselves in Iraq… it’s a normal, healthy, instinctual response to their (toxic) exposure to the anti-life cultures of West Hollywood and Manhattan via television + movies. They want to kill to affirm themselves as men, like young Vikings. It’s amazing!
Well, judging from the posts I’d say it is pretty much unanimous that ABC sucks a big green one. I think so also.
I stopped watching all the network channels because I absolutely hate realty shows and because of all the liberal political innuendoes. Now, I only watch HGTV, Disc or FoxNews. Network TV shows for entertainment need to keep their liberal views to themselves if they want to keep many of us watching!
well, I watched every Eli Stone and it wasn’t half bad, but on its last episode, about a transgender United Methodist minister, I lost it. I won’t miss it at all. I should have seen it coming when they kept fawning over George Michael the first season.
ABC is a screw up plain and simple. Aiming programming at a market segment who will actually watch it, that’s the key.
ABC is showing the same “take no resposibility for yourself” attitude as bad businesses, unions and whining homeowners are! Must be somebody elses fault even though I have not stuck with the aggreement I made to pay my mortgage ……… or in this case run my network in a profitable manner!!
Personal responsibility people!
God Bless America ………
I think ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson should throw a HUGE HUGE fit on prime time that no one watches his shows. I’d tune in to watch that, well at least for 5 minutes. Then I would go back to cable stations that I pay for.
Although I haven’t watched ABC for many moons, I have heard no reason from others to begin watching; it was obvious during the campaign that ABC was party to the liberal and biased MSM that was pro-Obama. And the “News”, which I have seen snip-its of on cable networks, is farciful and transparent as to ABC’s bias against any conservative view and for any liberal view. ABC should remember that it was the conservative-based Americans who were the founders and constructionists of America and that there are plenty more of us still living who appreciate what separates this great country from others (with freedoms and liberties and capitalistic vs. socialistic vs. communistic vs. dictatorship types, i.e.).
Wow, I didn’t know ABC was still in business… Haven’t heard anything about them in years… Must be an east coast thing..
I see, helping revive ratings by canceling successfull shows like Boston Legal. I think this was the only show where my conservatism was not offended by the show’s characters’ opinions. They were always balanced out by some aother character.
It was great and I sure will miss it. Now there is no reason for me to wath ABC now.And I will not. I think LOST is a big loser (Gilligan Island for the 21st century. How “lost” are they actually? Idiotic…)
Its not the Neilsen its you…you made a lot of mistakes during the election for not reporting fairly and everyone started going to Fox I know because I am one of them….if you can’t report the news to everyones advantage why listen to you …your going down and its you own fault and I for one do not feel badly about it…the only real media we have that is for everyone is Fox
Okay McPherson if you think that people at a bar are attentively watching how well do you think they will fill out that diary they are given after drinking a few drinks. Honestly I work at Nielsen and we can barely get the people at home to fill them out correctly.Or do you think we need to set up equipment in every hometown bar? Do you have any idea how this process works? You should go to one of the bussiest bars in town and pass out one of those diaries to all the people in there and then thats only one day or maybe only one hour. And i-pods? How do you get someone to take the time to do that?Because there is no way to use equipment for ipods. You are asking the impossible. These people don’t want to fill out the diary at home.How do you expect them to do it when they are using the convenience of an ipod. Thats why they are starting to use the box to try and get a more accurate read. We can only put in the computer what they give us. No more no less. Have you ever come to Nielsen to see how this works? Just blame us for your bad ratings. I guess everyone needs a fall guy. But maybe you need good information first before you can cast blame. We are here to help you not hurt you. We ask every family how many tvs they have and use. Whether they choose to fill them all out is their choice. So we try. Stop trying to blame others and get back to basics. We need good shows. Find some good young writers. Or maybe some good old writers.