A Few Thoughts on Network Upfront Week

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. May is when the semester wraps up here in East Lansing. That means grades have to be submitted, upset students consoled, and sorting through the inevitable set of excuses that accompanies every finals week. At the end of the fall semester the promise of the holiday season and all that it entails gives me the motivation to sort through the meshugas. There are no corresponding holidays at the end of the spring semester. Memorial Day is still weeks away. So I console myself with a pop culture lover’s unofficial holiday season…TV upfront week!


For those unfamiliar with the process, upfront week is when the major networks showcase their fall schedule for advertisers. It is our first chance to get a look at the upcoming slate of freshman shows that have been ordered to series.

This year, upfront week inspired a few thoughts:

1.  Hannibal has been renewed by NBC! If you’re wondering how this is possible (given that it’s watched by almost no one) the answer is that its international broadcasting rights helps to defer the shows staggering production costs. The world is a better place for it.
2. I’m intrigued by NBC’s Marry Me, from David Caspe (the creator of ABC’s Happy Endings). It is always interesting when someone who has created a brilliant product is tasked with creating a totally new project. Happy Endings was one of the best recent examples of ABC’s inability to properly place their talent. Their inability to set a coherent schedule is something like if when the Denver Broncos signed Peyton Manning, they had played him at strong safety. Endings was a casualty of that incompetence. We can’t bring it back, but now we get a chance to see if Caspe is a one hit wonder. On a separate note, if ABC ever murders the fantastic The Goldbergs, so help me high heaven, I will throw a tantrum. They have approved it for a second season, but when you are dealing with programming clowns of this order, nothing is ever certain.
3. Fox has decided to clear the deck on the whole upfront process. Rather than produce a huge number of pilots and order only a few to series, they have swept this process aside and elected to follow a cable-esque model of ordering shows straight to series on a 13 episode cycle. This is straight out of the FX playbook, and I love it. Keep your eye Gracepoint, an Americanization of the brilliant English detective series Broadchurch. They even brought in David Tennant to reprise his role as the principal investigator. Tennant is an electric talent who garnered a massive following from a turn as the Doctor on Dr. Who, and solidified his acting chops as the premiere Hamlet of the current generation of young British thespians. Also worth keeping an eye on are Empire, a hip-hop drama from Lee Daniels and starring Terrence Howard, and on Gotham a Batman prequel starring Ben McKenzie (to quiet all the OC nerds) and Donal Logue (whose previous work as a scruffy detective on the underappreciated Terriers more than earned him this shot at a role on a show sure to be a hit). The success or failure of this new model of production will go a long way towards dictating the future of television content.
4. CBS continues its plan to pummel us with mass appeal procedurals. The new NCIS spin-off NCIS: New Orleans starring Scott Bakula as Special Agent Dwayne Cassius Pride will predictably dominate in the ratings. Is NCIS cool? No, not really. But it’s first six seasons represented perhaps the pinnacle of the television procedural, and it continues to be a ratings behemoth. Bakula’s work on the TNT drama Men of a Certain Age, NBC’s Chuck, and in HBO’s Behind the Candelabra demonstrated the kind of leading man charisma that made Mark Harmon a Tuesday night fixture.

There are also a spate of cancelations and renewals. I am happy Dads is gone, stoked that Agent Carter has been picked up, disappointed that Almost Human didn’t make it, a little surprised that The Mindy Project was renewed, and not surprised at all that Community couldn’t quite make it to six seasons and a movie. TV is fickle sometimes, but there is a lot to be excited about in the coming year on the networks. Stay tuned for some thoughts about the next year on the cable networks!

This article appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll