Former CBS executive questions relevance of TV scheduler – Deadline

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During a visit to Los Angeles this summer, Jim McCains, former senior vice president of planning at CBS and who has taught television history at the college level for the past 13 years, had dinner with fellow television executives and discussed streaming. We shared concerns about the world and its ways. The audience and the experience of watching and loving TV seemed to take a backseat to algorithms and optimization. ”

Around the same time, news broke that Kevin Levy would be stepping down from his role as CW’s vice president of program planning, scheduling and acquisition. That’s when McEans realized that the role of a scheduler, “creating a prime-time lineup worth billions of dollars, 22 hours a week, 35 weeks a season, was no longer important.”

So McEearns sat down and wrote an article on Medium called “Scheduling a TV Memorial: Relief for a once-in-demand TV industry.” Along with providing a history lesson on how television scheduling came to be, McEans said:[Scheduling is] The word is gradually becoming irrelevant to the medium, meaning less and less as television itself becomes more and more relevant. Broadcast TV revenue is still determined by where and when on the prime-time grid, but in this streaming world, TV revenue is now tied to so much more. As Levy’s previous full title suggests, it’s: content strategy and acquisition, too.in the era of digital window processing, Monday at 9 o’clock is very last century. After all, who needs to make dining reservations if all meals are self-service? ”

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Although he only has a handful of followers on Medium, the column quickly gained a devoted audience. Especially former TV schedulers like Preston Beckman, Kelly Kahl and Andy Kubitz, showmen who assembled their own scrums on the TV Critics Tour. They share their experiences and love for speaking with reporters.

“Schedule is no longer what really drives the game,” McEearns wrote in his column. “lead in and lead out and hammock show and tent pole and companion piece and 4 tiers stacked and Scry and Retention gave way analysis and optimization and algorithm. The new strategy is curation. This is a successful business plan, but it’s hard to say what’s interesting about it. Or where do TV fans, whether they be executives or viewers, fit in? ”

So is he right?

Most of the time, yes, but it seems like some of his anger should be directed at the streamers. (He even quotes a high-ranking decision-maker at one platform as saying, “Isn’t streaming great? We have so many shows on the air and it doesn’t matter who watches them!” )

Despite the term scheduler being used, it still plays an important role in broadcast networks. Schedule settings It has been dropped from their titles over the years. Noriko G. Kelly is the only woman in the industry to hold this role at CBS. Steve Kahn works at NBC and reports to Jeff Bader, director of programming. Dan Harrison is someone to watch at Fox. Ari Goldman holds that role at ABC.

The strike has never tested executives’ scheduling skills more than this summer. As one former scheduler put it, “Someone had to put together a cohesive fall schedule with one arm tied behind their back.”

It’s a skill, he added.

Indeed, no one talks about the time slot wars anymore.no one seems interested tell a story Along with their prime time schedule. And there is little strategy in creating a clone of a program that already works. As McCains points out in his column, giving Dick Wolf an all-night show on NBC and CBS is “first and foremost about the power and influence of the showrunner.”

But even as consumers watch more television, linear schedules remain important. They are I want to see. One program planning executive said, “The schedule is not bad.” “It’s a recommendation engine. It’s a marketing tool. It’s a limiting factor. You’ve heard multiple streaming executives talk about choice paralysis, right? Viewers flip through these endless tiles. But we can’t find what we want to see. Our schedule needs to prioritize what’s important to us at the moment and communicate that to our viewers.”

In fact, there’s a reason Kubitz was hired by Netflix last year as director of content finance, responsible for programming and launch analysis. “Good broadcaster skills are definitely valuable and transferable to streaming,” the broadcast TV executive said. “In order to bring the largest or broadest audience to a platform, you want to get the highest ratings at the most reasonable cost. No, but there are lessons to be learned from it.”

McCairns concludes his column with the following line: what was it (It used to be the magic of producing and running 22 hours of prime time television a week.) More than likely. As a career? These days, switching operators and farriers are responsible for scheduling. Work is still being done, but it’s not in high demand. ”

Perhaps, but that’s probably not a view shared by Ryan Sharkey, who was named the CW’s new SVP of programming and content strategy today.