Monday, January 21, 2008

Broadcasters Cancel Script Commitments

“…Most completely-scripted programming is likely to become severely devalued to advertisers and the networks under these circumstances.”

That was the one key point from my post “Why Broadcast TV Can’t Use Scripted Programming” written in early November.

Now many, many scripted projects are being cancelled with the Hollywood Reporter announcing this morning the most recent with “In the latest fallout from the writers strike, CBS has trimmed its development slate, letting go of about 20 projects, most of them dramas.”

…CBS said. “This year’s pilot season, at best, will be played out in a very compressed time frame. In this landscape, we are better served creatively, financially and strategically by focusing our development on a more targeted number of projects.”

CBS is only the most recent to announce this. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the shows that will do best in the C3 are sports, reality, and game shows. It was inevitable though accelerated by the writers strike.

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