What Makes a Hit a Hit?
Sometimes getting a show on the air is only half the battle. Beyond having writing that makes a show and its characters come alive, Clifton sees network support as critical. “You have to have a network that has a vision and some balls. You can come up with a lot of great stories that are interesting, but at the end of the day, if the networks don’t buy into your vision, or if you have people there saying, ‘this is a little different from the stuff we know and we’re just not sure about it,’ rather than taking that gamble it’s just not going to work. You have to give it a chance, your show needs to be given shot.”
Even The Simpsons might have a harder time getting and staying on the air today than it did in the late 1980s. “The networks just aren’t giving shows the time they used to,” said Clifton. “Their attitude nowadays is it has to be an instant hit, period. There’s so many things in their pipeline that if it’s not a slam-dunk, then let’s just move on.”
Futurama may be a case in point of how everything can come together – almost. One would think that a Matt Groening-created series featuring some of the best writing and animation on TV and a loyal following would have a lock on becoming the next Simpsons. Yet Futurama just barely made it through five truncated seasons and 72 episodes – a not insignificant number, but a fraction of The Simpsons total and still growing output.
Grogin offers FOX’S perspective on Futurama and its animated brethren: “Primetime animation is a niche market, and we have to make sure any show we put on appeals to a substantial audience. You couldn’t do Kid Notorious (Comedy Central’s latest raunchy offering) or South Park on a broadcast network – not necessarily because of their language or theme, but because they have a narrow point of view. Personally, I enjoy Kid Notorious; it’s perfect for a niche network, but not for us.
“Futurama had a loyal, but a relatively small core audience,” Grogin said. “It connected very strongly with 18-34 year old men, but it didn’t do so well with 12-17 year olds and it didn’t appeal to women at all – very similar to The Family Guy, by the way. By comparison, The Simpsons has high demographics across the board.”
Those higher Simpsons demographics translated not only into higher ratings, but also into sizeable licensing and merchandising revenues as well, according to CN’s Lazzo. “A lot of the original production money was recovered very rapidly. There was a good revenue story with the Simpsons that I don’t think was replayed with Futurama or The Family Guy from the ratings standpoint.”
Both cancelled series have become ratings winners for Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim block, where they reach a far greater concentration of their prime demographic. In recent months, rumors have surfaced of a possible revival for either or both series via a co-venture between the two networks. “Based on the cost per episode and the number of viewers they actually brought in for FOX, they probably weren’t the kind of properties that made sense for them to continue,” says Lazzo. “Family Guy has sold a large number of DVDs for FOX, so there has been interest to a degree in that property. We’ve been talking for months about that type of thing [a joint effort] with FOX. Whether something will come out of it is too early to say. [Editor’s note: Sources confidentially report that FOX will resume production of Family Guy with 35 new episodes in that could return in January 2005. This would make it the first time a canceled series has been revived due to DVD demand and ratings success in syndication.]
“There hasn’t been an equivalent situation with Futurama to date,” Lazzo offers. “It did quite well on DVD but didn’t sell the numbers that Family Guy sold. In fact, King of the Hill didn’t sell the numbers that Family Guy sold. Family Guy seems to be one of those shows that worked in cable much better than it did in broadcast.”
Lazzo goes on to describe the fate of any number of network shows, animated and live-action alike. “I think a large part of that was that you couldn’t find the show. When it first premiered I thought it was a pretty good show, but not the kick in the teeth The Simpsons had been, and I lost track of it because they moved it on the schedule. Then I tuned in the second season and went, wow, this show feels really fresh and funny now.
“It happens all the time: great little shows just tend to get lost,” explains Lazzo. “Audiences are fickle and you have to have a critical mass there or it just doesn’t make sense for the programmer to stick with it. Very often shows are stopped before they can find that audience. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I understand why it happens.”
Unless viewers make an effort or have the luck to revisit a series after it’s worked out its early kinks or moved around the schedule, the networks will take it as a rejection on the audience’s part. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that usually ends with (in the eyes of the show’s partisans) a premature cancellation. Anyone (like this author) who watched Futurama get pre-empted week after week by lengthy football telecasts or double runs of The Simpsons can tell when a network has given up on a series long before it actually leaves the air.
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