The TV Journal

Dear Diary,

It seems like Friday night on television is becoming such a ghost town, pretty much like Saturday night is all ready. I recently read an interview with TV producer Barry Levinson where lamented the lack of original programming on Saturday nights. He said,

Somehow the networks decided to forfeit Saturday nights. You have a massive audience, they’re available and they can’t find anything to watch.

He’s so right. Near as I can tell, May 1, 2004 is the night that Saturday died.

See, that’s when CBS aired the last new episode of ‘The District.’ The next fall none of the broadcast nets put a new drama on sitcom on the schedule for Saturday nights. I was hardly surprised when I realized CBS is also the last broadcast net to program a full three-hour line-up on Friday nights. CBS airs new episodes of ‘Ghost Whisperer’ at 8, ‘Medium’ at 9, and ‘Numb3rs’ at 10. They have also been the ratings leader on Friday nights since all three shows premiered this season on September 25, 2009. Surprise, surprise.

It looks like Fox’s Friday lineup may be the first to fall. Sitcoms ‘Til Death’ and ‘Brothers’ are moving to Sundays. All thirteen episodes of ‘Dollhouse’ will probably still air but it’s been pulled from the air during the all-important November sweeps. Both hours will be replaced with reruns. As for the other networks, ABC, NBC, and CW each have one original, scripted hour of television on Fridays.

I think we’ll learn a lot about what the networks intends to do with Fridays at next year’s upfronts. But we’ve already lost Saturdays and Fridays are fading fast. Oh well, I guess five nights of television is still something.

Still a fan,
C.C.

P. S. Come to think of it, technically, there was some original scripted programming on Saturday nights earlier this year. Several networks dumped their unaired episodes of canceled shows on Saturdays. CBS series “Harper’s Island,” NBC series “Kings,” and ABC’s “Pushing Daisies” all aired “new” episodes on Saturdays.

Posted in Uncategorized barry levinson, cbs, friday tv, programming, saturday tv

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