A Former CBS Executive Suggests TV Schedulers Are Becoming Irrelevant. Is He Right?
A Former CBS Executive Suggests TV Schedulers Are Becoming Irrelevant. Is He Right?
During a summer visit to Los Angeles this year, Jim McKairnes — a former SVP Planning for CBS who’s spent the past 13 years teaching TV history at the college level — had dinner with a …
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“Scheduling doesn’t really run the game anymore,” McKairnes wrote in his column. “Lead-ins and lead-outs and hammock shows and tentpoles and companion pieces and four-stacks and Sweeps and retention have given way to analytics and optimization and algorithms. The new strategy is curation.
But linear schedules still are relevant, even though consumers now watch television the way they want to watch it. “Look, the schedule is not a bad thing,” said one high-ranking broadcasting exec. “It is a recommendation engine. It is a marketing tool. It is a limiting factor. I’ve heard more than one streaming executive mention talk about the paralysis of choice, right? Viewers flip through these endless tiles and can’t find something that they want to watch. The schedule forces us to prioritize what is important to us at this moment in time, and to communicate that to the viewer.”
McKairnes ends his column by saying: “But for some — those of a certain stripe, say — a new TV season these days is just plain more about what was (the magic that used to be the creation and execution of a 22-hour prime-time TV week) than what will be. As a career? These days, Scheduling is up there with switchboard-operator or farrier: The work’s still done, but it’s not exactly in high demand.”