Wow, Is That the MTV Crowd Peeking at CBS? (Excerpt)

Business Week - June 6, 2000

POWER LUNCH
BY RONALD GROVER

With shows like Survivor, the Tiffany Network is slowly reaching beyond its core of older viewers

O.K., I admit it. I occasionally watch the CBS television network. And not just for pro football games. Most weeks, my wife and I make a weekly appointment to watch Judging Amy, an all-too-moving drama about a single mother who's also a childrens' court judge somewhere in Connecticut.

Does watching CBS make me an old fogy, especially since the network's audience has a median age of 54, and most of its shows are watched by folks who barely make it to Amy's 10 p.m. starting time? I sure hope not. But the simple fact is that CBS has a problem. In a world where advertisers love folks barely able to drive, demographics filled with the elders who flock to CBS can be the kiss of death in TV land.

All the more interesting that the hottest show of the summer season seems to be CBS's Survivor, that real-life drama of 16 folks stuck in a South China Sea island called Pulau Tiga. I could hardly believe it when the show finished a close second in its first week to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and handily beat Regis in the prized 18-to-49 age group. In its second head-to-to head fight with Millionaire, Survivor actually outdrew Regis and his questions by 2.5 million viewers.

ORWELLIAN PRIMETIME. The show is supposed to run til the end of August for the Tiffany Network. But given its instant success, maybe Survivor will get another go-round with a different cast once the current run ends. In any case, it's a bold attempt to wrest away some of the teenyboppers who flock to the WB for Dawson's Creek and whatever it is that they watch over on Fox and UPN these days.

And CBS isn't through yet. Sometime in July, it'll be rolling out another example of TV voyeurism, this time a show called Big Brother that puts 10 strangers in a house that is being monitored by two dozen cameras and 59 microphones. We get to peek in and, just like on Survivor, one of them will be voted off the show each week.

If this format sounds a heck of a lot like the MTV hit show Real World, it should. That show gets surprisingly good ratings by offering teens real-life soap operas of folks with drug problems, sexual issues, and other quirky hang-ups. Fact is, MTV and CBS are owned by the same company these days -- Viacom -- so it didn't take long for one side of the house to glom onto what has been working quite well elsewhere.

DUTCH TREAT. But give CBS TV Chief Executive Leslie Moonves credit for taking risks. It cost him $20 million to secure the rights to Big Brother, a Dutch show that he's importing. Moonves is no dummy. Heck, Millionaire came from Britain. The theory seems to be, what works overseas will likely work here.

At least Moonves, a one-time actor who played the heavy on shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, knows CBS is in trouble. The joke around the recently completed "upfront" advertising session for the coming season was that CBS was cleaning up on ads for Depends and Metamucil. With its older demos, CBS didn't have the greatest "upfront" season -- ABC's ad sales were up by 41%, while CBS eked out a small increase and sold only $1.6 billion worth of ads, compared to $2.3 billion each for the two other major networks.

Moonves now intends to use Survivor and Big Brother to launch CBS's fall lineup, with an eye to youth. That's why you'll see tons of promos for such CBS shows as Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, and, yes, my own personal favorite, Judging Amy. The idea is that if you put enough of those ads in front of that many eyeballs, some viewers will tune in to the shows on other nights.

POST-BOOMER BOOM? And Lord knows most of those shows haven't been seen by many youngsters. You can bet CBS won't be promoting the likes of the gray-haired Dick Van Dyke and his geriatric crime show Diagnosis: Murder on any of those Survivor episodes.

Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for Business Week.


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