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The network balance sheets can also be read several ways. NBC, plagued for the past five years by streaks of bad management and bad luck, lost $40 million in 1981, according to Television Digest, though the figures for 1982 should be more encouraging. ABC benefited from a skein of prime-tune comedies watched by the young urban audiences so attractive to advertisers, and from a dominant afternoon soap-opera schedule that accounts for perhaps half the network's income. It won the 1981 profit sweepstakes: $215 million to CBS's $160 million. In real-dollar terms, however, all three networks have lost ground ABC since 1977, the peak year for profits.
In the ratings recession, network programmers have chosen to stay the course. Says Bud Grant, president of CBS Entertainment: "The best thing we can do is what we've done best in the past." Lee Rich, president of Lorimar Productions, calls this new passivity "a death wish." But it does mean that low-rated shows that once would have been quickly canceled are now given a few more months of life. Economics, not generosity, is the reason. A canceled hourlong show can cost the networks $1 million for each unaired episode; they lose less money continuing to air it than they would by buying a new series that might do no better.
As the number of potential genres for hit series becomes more limited—remember variety shows? westerns? wall-to-wall theatrical movies?—the networks have turned increasingly to two virtual guarantors of healthy ratings: the mini-series and the made-for-TV movie. When Hollywood movies began, in the past decade, their near exclusive courtship of the youth market, they abandoned two narrative forms that had served them long and honorably, the multigenerational saga and the social-problem drama. So beginning with ABC's 1976 version of Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man, the networks stepped in and cleaned up.
In plot outline the minis may be as predictable as any sitcom: an extended family faces decisions of heart and conscience to the martial beat of a nation, nay a world, in turmoil. As works of popular art they may lack the vigor, star power and lush craftsmanship of their real-movie predecessors. But the minis found a new audience for purveyors of the noble potboiler and offered home viewers the chance to see characters who actually developed, crises that were not resolved in 51 minutes. The made-for-TV movies followed the same prescription writ small: liberal melodramas in which ordinary folks rise to heroic stature while battling an incurable malady or a bunkered social outlook. The TV movies have become consistent ratings winners at a time when overexposure on the pay movie channels has made even the most popular Hollywood film a risky network proposition. One made-for-TV movie, Drop-Out Father, a sort of Kramer Hits the Road starring Dick Van Dyke, won a larger audience share (37%) than any theatrical movie shown on free TV this season.