Fall Season’s Scripted Reduction Bodes Badly for Broadcast TV

When the U.S. broadcast networks launch their fall-season lineups this week, they will quietly mark a historic milestone: the fewest original scripted series on their slates for at least the last 20 years.

While that excludes last year, when there was barely a fall broadcast season to speak of thanks to the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, it does include COVID-plagued 2020 and 2007, the year of the previous WGA strike. And by the standards of Hollywood operating under “business as usual,” 2024 is practically a wasteland for the comedies and dramas that have long defined network television in the United States.

Of course, we’ve all grown used to doom-laden pronouncements about the state of network TV, and it’s long since the fall season had the relevance it possessed in the pre-streaming era. But this year’s offerings feel different: The long-expected shrinking of the broadcast TV landscape is, it seems, beginning to manifest in earnest.

Only 41 scripted series will air in the fall lineups of the big five networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW — this year, marking a nearly 50% decline from a peak of 76 just seven years ago.

The contraction is particularly pronounced at Disney’s ABC, where just five scripted shows are set to debut before the new year — down from 11 two years ago — and only one night a week, Thursday, will include no unscripted titles in primetime. (Long gone are “ABC Comedy Wednesdays,” with “Abbott Elementary” the lone half-hour comedy among the network’s fall premieres.)

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that the drop in scripted series is a lingering aftereffect of last year’s strikes and that the tally could rebound, at least partially, over the next couple of years, as writers continue to work on developing new projects. CBS, after all, is still producing almost as many dramatic series as ever, while NBC’s tally is the highest it’s been since before the pandemic.

But if reports on the ground in the industry are any indication, the chill in the content market has yet to show much evidence of thawing, as new overall deals remain elusive in the post-peak TV environment. Nor is this the only indication that the broadcast landscape may be undergoing a more permanent shift.

Nexstar’s downsizing of The CW, for instance, is continuing apace, with “All American” (held for midseason) and the soon-to-conclude “Superman & Lois” now the last remnants of the network’s pre-sale lineup.

The CW’s remaining primetime programming hours are currently filled either by unscripted shows or Canadian and British imports, with only two new original scripted series currently in production, per Luminate’s Film & TV database.

This is no repercussion of the strikes: The CW’s previous business model was built on co-owners Warner Bros. and CBS (now Paramount Global) producing shows for the network and leveraging the licensing rights to generate cash. The two companies struck a lucrative deal in 2016 to loan CW shows to Netflix, a pact Variety once described as “one of the richest TV output deals ever.”

But that all changed with the advent of the streaming wars. In 2019, Warners and Paramount ended the Netflix deal in order to retain CW shows for their own streaming platforms, cutting off the revenue stream that funded the series in the first place.

This led directly to a gutting of the network ahead of the Nexstar sale — in May of 2022, The CW canceled half its slate — and the station group took control later that year, with a mandate to take a more cost-conscious approach to programming.

It may be tempting to dismiss this as a unique situation, but Nexstar’s programming strategy for The CW — namely homing in on unscripted, sports and international series — could very well become a standard playbook for broadcast networks in the years to come. ABC, for one, is already well on the way, and it’s anyone’s guess what David Ellison & Co. will do with CBS once they finally take control of Paramount Global.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising to see broadcast networks become secondary windows for streaming content. ABC aired episodes of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” amid the production shutdown last year; why not continue to use broadcast’s high-visibility time slots to promote SVOD content to the networks’ older-skewing audiences — in line with the fate of Paramount’s Showtime cable channel (now Paramount+ With Showtime)?

Indeed, cable networks’ fate in general may be a roadmap for the future of broadcast: Original scripted content shuttered post-peak TV, programming time filled by unscripted shows and recycled content, unique identities hollowed out in the name of cost savings. It may take time to arrive there, but broadcast’s journey down that road has already begun.