The Upfronts: How TV’s Big Week Evolved From Chess Match to WWE Free For All

The TV upfronts have a long and colorful history, rooted in grainy images of network executives strategically moving shows around an oversized scheduling board, trying to parry moves by other programmers in the equivalent of a high-stakes chess match.

Today, the strategy is less a cerebral cat-and-mouse game of positioning those pieces than a WWE-style free for all, where programmers try to assemble cohesive lineups but can’t begin to plan how to counter competition that’s coming at them on a multitude of fronts.

Billions of dollars in advance commitments still hang in the balance, with networks and now streaming services seeking to impress media buyers and garner their share of the advertising pie. While sellers still dress to impress, from flying in talent to hosting parties, the Trump economy has cast a shroud over this year’s festivities, stoking fears companies will cut back on spending amid looming recession anxiety.

The shift from linear TV to streaming has fundamentally altered the upfronts in a variety of ways, diluting once-common terms like “lead-in” and “audience retention.” In foodie parlance, it’s the difference between a meticulously prepared meal, where every dish has its place, and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Much of the process thus bears scant resemblance to when TV viewing was seen as a zero-sum game, and scheduling maneuvers — like Fox placing “The Simpsons” opposite “The Cosby Show” in 1990, or NBC relocating “Frasier” to challenge “Roseanne” in 1994 (prompting ABC to retaliate by swapping in “Home Improvement”) — could elicit gasps from the media-savvy crowds that attended.

As a result, the gamesmanship and media buzz surrounding the upfront have lost considerable luster, at least from the days of that “Simpsons”-“Cosby” matchup, or when NBC and CBS had the audacity to pit two new medical dramas, “ER” and “Chicago Hope,” directly against each other.

Such moves actually captured the public’s imagination as well, giving the primetime schedules the texture of a major prize fight. “THE BART VS. BILL BATTLE — CAN FOX KO ‘COSBY’ WITH ‘THE SIMPSONS?'” one headline blared at the time.

Big scheduling gambits inspired military analogies, casting the annual showdown as a form of warfare, just with sitcoms and dramas dispatched as the soldiers doing battle. Then-ABC scheduling chief Alan Sternfeld paraphrased Gulf War General Norman Schwarzkopf to explain the decision to counter NBC by throwing “Home Improvement” against “Frasier,” telling the Los Angeles Times, “We’re sort of borrowing from the doctrine of Schwarzkopf: If you’re interested in accomplishing something, use overwhelming force.”

“The ‘Home Improvement’-‘Frasier’ move was the biggest scheduling gamble of my career,” Ted Harbert, who was president of ABC Entertainment at the time, told TheWrap, noting ABC wound up winning that time-period battle. Harbert also recalled the brinksmanship associated with cobbling together the primetime lineup, seeking intelligence on the other networks’ plans while staying up into the wee hours of the morning in his hotel room dictating the next morning’s presentation to scheduling executive Jeff Bader, then faxing the speech to the venue where the clips and slides were being put together.

Even as the world gradually changed, nobody played the scheduling game more meticulously than CBS, which touted its No. 1 status (if you drank every time “No. 1” was said during its upfront presentation, you’d never survive the cocktail party) in splashy annual gatherings at Carnegie Hall.

Last week, the network unveiled its lineup in lower-key fashion for the press in a Hollywood conference room before the official upfront week, although it did host a talent-studded party at the Paramount lot to commemorate the announcement and will hold private events with media buyers.

In a few respects, the more things change, the more they stay the same. CBS outlined its lineup night by night, discussing the desire to create audience flow for linear-TV viewers who can still be lured from one program into the next. Hence a night where the venerable crime procedural “NCIS” leads into “NCIS: Origins” and “NCIS: Sydney.”

At the same time, the network’s emphasis on delayed and streaming viewing has shifted the calculus. When everybody follows their own metrics, and a key yardstick for broadcast networks has become 35-day multiplatform viewing (that is, how many people watched your show, anywhere, over five weeks), suddenly how well a network fared versus ABC or NBC on Thursday night fades in significance.

Asked about the extent to which CBS considers its network competitors in setting the primetime lineup, CBS Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach said she sees its competition much more broadly, consisting of all the available TV content, including Netflix and other “have it when you want it” options.

“We definitely schedule first and foremost for the audience and ourselves,” she said. “We still believe in the art of scheduling and flow, and that it makes sense night to night.”

Granted, other aspects of the upfront remain similar to the past, beginning with the disappointment of viewers learning that their favorite shows have been canceled. TV’s metrics might have changed, but its underlying proposition — that you need enough people watching to justify keeping a show around — really hasn’t.

The major wrinkle now is that people mourning the loss of a series can instantly go online, finding other people who share their passion, even if there weren’t enough of them to justify its existence.

Ultimately, the upfronts provide a concentrated symbol of a changing business. As ratings service Nielsen put it in an analysis of the “newfronts” for digital platforms last year, “Broadcast and cable are entertainment pillars, but we’re firmly in the streaming age,” with streaming having firmly emerged as “the dominant form of TV viewing.”

To borrow the aforementioned military terminology, media companies remain engaged in combat for viewers’ attention and ad dollars, both of which are finite resources, even in an age of abundance. But the battlefield has moved.

At that CBS presentation, president and CEO George Cheeks addressed the broad hurdles this year’s upfront market entails, while alluding to specific ones facing CBS as parent Paramount Global jumps through the Trump FCC’s hoops in seeking approval of its Skydance Media merger. He called this “a very disruptive and challenging time for our industry and our company.”

Like everyone else, CBS is feeling its way through that uncertainty. While that still means trying to put together a compatible roster of shows every night for the hardy holdouts that consume TV that way, the minutia of what other networks are doing on a given night in a certain hour, like much of the TV model that held sway from the medium’s birth into this century, is going the way of the dinosaur.

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