The coming week is one of my favourites of each year. What’s so special about it? Well, it’s the annual Upfront presentations. For the uninitiated, the Upfronts take place each year in New York and it’s where each of the TV networks attempts to sell commercial time for the upcoming season to advertisers. What that means to the rest of us is that we get our first look at what new shows were picked up, which were moved to new time slots, and which were cancelled.
Last year’s Upfronts displayed a fairly disappointing crop (read about it here, here, here, here, and here). That might lead you to believe there weren’t any new shows last year worth watching, but that’s definitely not the case. There were plenty of great new shows, they just weren’t on network TV. The Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, The Killing, Game Of Thrones among others were fantastic series on cable networks. This has become something of a trend in recent years, with cable’s subscription revenue requiring lower viewership to turn a profit allowing them to be more experimental, creating genuinely unique and interesting shows rather than having to play it safe by churning out more doctors, lawyers, cops, and “the next Friends”. Hopefully this year will bring a little more creativity from the majors.
The schedule for the 2011 Upfronts is as follows:
Monday, May 16 – NBC and Fox
Tuesday, May 17 – ABC
Wednesday, May 18 – CBS
Thursday, May 19 – CW
This morning NBC released it’s fall schedule early. I’ll wait for tomorrow when, hopefully, there’ll be some clips and sizzle reels to look at for each show before I make my initial judgements. One thing that does stand out about the schedule at first glance, though, is that less than half of their programming will be scripted. A whole lot more reality TV is headed our way from the (former) peacock, and that may be a trend that the other networks will regrettably follow.
Check back tomorrow when I’ll have a rundown of the announcements from NBC and Fox.
Sleep well,
DTE
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