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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 fellow TV executive who shared concerns about the streaming world and how “viewers and the experience of watching and loving TV seemed to take a back seat to algorithms and optimizations.”
Around the same time, news broke that Kevin Levy was stepping down from his role as EVP Program Planning, Scheduling and Acquisitions at The CW. That’s when it dawned on McKairnes that the role of a scheduler, “the crafting of a 22-hours-a-week, 35-weeks-a-season primetime lineup worth jillions of dollars, just isn’t a thing anymore.”
So McKairnes sat down and wrote a piece for Medium called “Scheduling a TV Memoriam: An RIP Of Sorts for a Once-In-Demand Television Industry.” Along with offering a history lesson on how TV scheduling came to be, McKairnes said “[scheduling is] the word that’s slowly becoming irrelevant to the medium, having less and less meaning as television itself comes to mean more and more,” McKairnes wrote. “Broadcast television revenues still pivot on the whens and wheres of a primetime grid, but in this our streaming world they’re connected to so much more now. As evidenced by Levy’s full former title, it’s about content strategy and acquisitions, too. In an era of digital windowing, Mondays at 9 is so last century. After all, who needs a meal to be scheduled when all the food is self serve?”
Although he has only a handful of followers of Medium, the column immediately found an invested audience, particularly among former broadcast TV schedulers like Preston Beckman, Kelly Kahl and Andy Kubitz — showmen who used to attract their own scrums at the Television Critics Tour because of their experience and affection for talking shop with reporters.
“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. It’s a successful business plan, but it’s hard to say where the fun is in that. Or where the TV fan — be it an executive or a viewer — fits in.”
So is he right?
For the most part yes, though it seems like some of his ire should be directed at streamers. (He even quotes a high-ranking decision-maker at one of the platforms who said, “Isn’t streaming great? You put all these shows on, and it doesn’t matter if anyone watches!”)
Schedulers still play an important role at the broadcast networks, even though the word scheduling has been dropped from their titles over the years; Noriko Gee Kelley is the industry’s only woman in the role at CBS; Steve Kern has the job at NBC, where he reports to President of Program Planning Jeff Bader; Dan Harrison is the man to see at Fox and Ari Goldman serves in that capacity at ABC.
Never were those executives’ scheduling prowess tested more than this summer because of the strike. As one former scheduler says, “someone had to put together a cohesive fall schedule with one arm tied behind their back.”
That’s a skill, he added.
Sure, no one talks about time slot wars anymore. No one seems keen on telling a story with their primetime schedule. And there’s hardly any strategy in making duplicates of shows that already work: as McKairnes points out in his column, giving Dick Wolf full nights of programming on NBC and CBS is “more about showrunner power and influence than anything else.”
But linear schedules are still 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 program planning 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.”
In fact, there’s a reason why Kubitz was hired by Netflix last year as a content finance director of programming and launch analytics. “Those skills of being a good broadcaster are definitely valuable and applicable to streaming,” said the broadcast TV exec. “You want to get the highest rating at the most reasonable cost so that you’re bringing the biggest or broadest audience to the platform. And if you’re a streamer, there are lessons to be taken from that that I’m not sure have been fully absorbed.”
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.”
Maybe, but that’s probably not an opinion shared by Ryan Sharkey, who just today was named the CW’s new SVP, programming and content strategy for The CW.
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