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CBS likely to court younger viewers with Viacom at the helm
Tuesday, October 19, 1999
By DIANE HOLLOWAY
With Viacom's purchase of CBS scheduled for approval any day now, will viewers of the Big Eye notice any difference?
Will Dan Rather turn up on Viacom-owned MTV as a guest VJ decked out in an Old Navy sweater? Will David Letterman be farmed out to "The Real World" for a round of Stupid Teen Tricks?
Probably not. But expect to see a shift in tone and demographics sooner rather than later. It didn't take long after Disney bought ABC in 1996 for Disney movies and Disney-produced sitcoms to be sprayed like fairy dust all over ABC's schedule.
It wasn't as big a deal when General Electric bought NBC. There were charges that NBC News had become slanted, notably an instance in 1990 when "Today" reported on several consumer boycotts but ignored a big one against GE. About the only thing viewers noticed on the entertainment front was an increase in "Late Night" jokes about the lights going out in Rockefeller Center.
Last month Viacom announced its purchase of CBS for $35 billion, the largest media merger since Walt Disney Co. bought ABC/Capital Cities for $19 billion. CBS had been on the block for a long time. Ted Turner tried to buy it in the mid-1980s, and there were whispers about Disney's interest later in the decade.
Slowly but surely, corporations are merging and buying out their competition. If Sprint and MCI become one big conglomerate, your phone bill and Internet bill and maybe even your cable bill will morph into one humongous bill.
Corporate gobbling isn't just happening in telecommunications. There's a long history of it across the corporate landscape. Philip Morris Inc., the folks who helped create a nation of smokers (and coughers), also sells macaroni and cereal.
The CBS/Viacom merger continues an opposites-attract trend. Of all the commercial networks, CBS skews the oldest. That means there are more viewers over 49 watching CBS than ABC, NBC or Fox. That's not good business.
Even though the network finished last season No. 1 in the ratings, industry folks considered the victory a flop because of the older demographics -- advertisers prefer shows that target free-spending youth. CBS's top-rated shows are "60 Minutes," "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "JAG." Not exactly youth magnets like "Dawson's Creek."
CBS entertainment chief Leslie Moonves proudly crowed to critics in July that the "other guys" were welcome to the teeny-boppers and twentysomethings. CBS would happily continue to pursue a mass audience, and that includes older viewers.
But with Viacom at the helm, that's not likely to continue, according to several ad buyers who predict the lure of bigger bucks for younger viewers will be too strong to ignore.
The Viacom influence may not be apparent by next fall, since development of those shows is in the works. But by 2001 -- and maybe even by midseason next year -- we could see a change. Look for less talk about aging boomers and mass appeal, and more talk about younger demos and target audiences.
Media analysts almost universally say the media marriage of CBS and Viacom is good for both sides. The network of William Paley and Walter Cronkite could use some fresh blood and fresh ideas. The MTV influence may seem extreme, but don't forget that Viacom also owns MTV's kid cable phenomenon Nickelodeon, arguably the best source for innovation on commercial TV.
CBS hasn't fared too well on Saturday mornings, and Nickelodeon -- home of clever tyke shows "Hey, Arnold," "Blue's Clues" and "Rugrats" -- could do wonders for the Big Eye by supplying producers and writers and maybe even reruns of the shows themselves. Nor has CBS been able to attract kids and teens to early evening sitcoms the way ABC has done on Friday nights and NBC has done with "Friends." The creative Nick folks who crafted the sketch comedy show "All That" and the teen sitcom "Kenan & Kel" could probably fix CBS's woes in that area, too.
The broadcast networks, which have been bleeding viewers to cable for years, believe the answer to their problems is to circumvent the competition by copying cable. Fox -- now headed by former Comedy Central chief Doug Herzog -- has done a pretty good job in that regard by luring "Beavis & Butt-head" creator Mike Judge to produce "King of the Hill" and giving David E. Kelley plenty of room to indulge his fantasies with "Ally McBeal."
But CBS's successes have been more traditional. The only slightly innovative show on CBS this season is "Now and Again," a high-tech updating of "The Six Million Dollar Man." The Viacom-MTV influence could pump CBS's prime-time schedule in the new millennium with hip, sardonic shows like the animated "Daria" and "Celebrity Death Match."
As for the distant future, well, Letterman won't last forever. His ratings are sagging, and, to hear him tell it, so is he. The good old days of Dave sticking to walls in Velcro suits and tossing watermelons off skyscrapers are long gone. If CBS wants to go for late-night weirdness, it could replace Letterman with wacky standup Tom Green, whose MTV show is a major hit with young viewers.
Kraft macaroni didn't start adding nicotine to its packages after Philip Morris bought the company, and Mike Wallace isn't likely to turn up hosting "Blue's Clues." But there will be changes.
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