It's a nightmare I tell you

[Texsox]

Just one year after baseball looked like one of the worst programming investments a television network had ever made, postseason ballgames are transforming the competitive landscape of the fall prime-time television season.

 

Executives at every network agree that an irresistable baseball storyline - with the presence of the long-suffering Chicago Cubs and the legendarily cursed Boston Red Sox - has captivated millions of viewers, who are apparently finding many of the regular offerings on other networks decidedly tepid by comparison.

 

Indeed, a long list of television's most-popular shows, including "Everybody Loves Raymond" on CBS, "ER" and "Law and Order: SVU" on NBC and even "Monday Night Football" on ABC, have shown ratings declines compared with the same period last season on nights when they competed directly with baseball playoffs.

 

The beneficiary of this ratings turnaround is Fox, a network whose entertainment executives were at this very time last October lamenting how postseason baseball was driving down the network's overall prime-time ratings while interrupting the premieres of its fall lineup.

 

"You haven't been able to get any sense of the lay of the land of anybody's schedule this season because baseball is so skewing the numbers," Lloyd Braun, the chairman of ABC Entertainment, which is a unit of the Walt Disney Company.

 

David F. Poltrack, the executive vice president for research at CBS, which is owned by Viacom Inc., added that the already potent impact baseball has had on Fox's competitors may only be heightened if the Cubs were to face the Red Sox in the World Series. With a possible matchup of two teams that have not won a title in nearly a century (95 years for the Cubs, 86 for the Red Sox), Fox might be able to threaten NBC's long hold on the competition among 18-to-49-year-old viewers that those networks consider the definition of leadership in television.

 

"I would think NBC has to be nervous," Mr. Poltrack said. "Baseball could wind up being huge."

 

And this is a sport that was all but written off as a TV attraction after record-low ratings last season. Baseball had performed so badly that Fox's parent, the News Corporation, took a $227 million write-down on its more than $2 billion baseball contract last year.

 

Sandy Grushow, the chairman of Fox Entertainment, acknowledged that baseball has pulled off an astonishing turnaround. "The corporation has obviously taken quite a licking on Major League Baseball in the past," he said. "Now it's time to enjoy the benefits - and enjoying them we are."

 

The first three games of the two League Championship Series brought in almost 50 percent more viewers than last year, 15.7 million to 10.7 million. The other three networks are down on those nights, to an average of 12.4 million from an average of 13.6 million viewers.

 

This flight of viewers comes at an inopportune time. The networks, which have begun their fall seasons, desperately want to seize the attention of viewers, especially for their new shows. But so far, no new series has given any sign of breaking out as a hit. And executives at the competing networks say baseball is at least partly responsible.

 

"Who knows if one of the new shows might have popped a number if baseball hadn't been in there?" Mr. Braun of ABC said.

 

The show most directly affected so far is probably the NBC drama "Boomtown," which was removed from the network's schedule on Friday nights for at least two weeks. Some decisions about struggling shows are clearly being put off, until more normal competition resumes. That means some new shows may actually have gotten a reprieve from an early termination.

 

One new ABC drama in that category is probably "Karen Sisco," which was pummeled in the ratings last Wednesday night. But ABC does not know whether viewers abandoned the show because they did not like it or because all four teams in the playoffs were in action.

 

"We're getting killed in Chicago and Boston," Mr. Braun said. "And New York and Miami are involved too. That's four big markets where millions of people are watching baseball."

 

The baseball bonanza is not all good news for Fox, according to Mr. Grushow. He said that baseball is not ideally suited to Fox, because its fans tend to be older than Fox's audience. And the disruption in Fox's schedule presents a challenge, he said. Fox had a disastrous fall last year, starting new shows like "Fastlane" and "John Doe" in mid-September only to have to pull them two weeks later, just as viewers were establishing loyalties. The shows never recovered.

 

As a result, Mr. Grushow and the other top Fox entertainment executive, Gail Berman, decided to skip the fall start-up this year. Instead they inserted a new show they had especially high hopes for, "The O.C.," in the summer, to get it sampled by viewers. It fared well - and will now be back after baseball ends.Now that Fox has skipped the fall madness, it will never go back, he said. Will other promising shows be started in summer, and then be held out until after baseball? "You bet," Mr. Grushow said. He added, "We've seen our future."

 

Starting the season later for most of its series - like the returning "24" and new shows like "Skin" - will allow Fox to show four or five original episodes of its shows when the other networks will have exhausted their supply.

 

And with the return of two reality shows that helped the network dominate the second half of the season - "Joe Millionaire" and "American Idol" - Fox has a chance to pass NBC, which is owned by the General Electric Company, for the first time.

 

Mr. Grushow dismisses talk of a potential season win. "NBC will have the finales of 'Friends' and 'Frasier.' That's going to make it extremely challenging," he said. And he emphasized the downside of starting a season in November. That means Fox will face the usual programming stunts from the other networks in a ratings sweep month.

 

But it will be a lot easier for Fox to play out the rest of season after hitting a grand slam in the first inning.

[southsider2k5]

The ratings might be the only good thing to come of this. Can you imagine the ratings for a Twins/Marlins WS? :puke

[Texsox]

I figured I was spared trhe agony by being so far away from home. Nope they frickin that could be cool.Cubs are everybodies choice. Plus everyone thinks I'm a damn Cubs fan since I'm from Chicago. They just don't get that the Cubs in the postseason is a nightmare.