Voilà (sort of)!

So what’s on the block at the 'upfronts' this month? Could it be the future of television? asks Virginia Heffernan...

Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.

In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.

And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.

They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.

Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)

To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.

And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.

It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.

Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.

"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."

Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?