TV executives renew the safest comedies — and the riskiest ones: study

When it comes to TV comedies, it’s almost impossible to predict which shows will take off and which will flop. So when television executives are stocking their writing rooms, you’d think they would choose a safe mix of veterans who have worked together before and rookies with fresh perspectives. 

But according to a fascinating new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business, unlike their counterparts in other creative fields who play it safe, TV execs tend toward extremes: they renew popular comedies created by tried-and-true writers who have collaborated in the past, and they give shows made teams that have largely never worked together prior second chance — even if they weren’t popular in their first season.

“They're confronted with a show that’s had its first season and they have to decide whether to keep it running or replace it with something else, because there's a lot of opportunity cost attached to that time slot,” says UBC Sauder Assistant Professor and study co-author Patrick Reilly, who has spent much of his career studying creative industries. 

For the study, titled Must See TV or Must Keep TV: The Nuances of Creative Performance and Team Composition in Television, the team downloaded much of the data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) from 1987 to 2006 — including synopses of shows, who produced them, who worked on them, and what other shows creators had worked on in the past. (They chose that date range because after 2006, YouTube and cable networks fragmented the market.) They also tracked series’ viewership levels and which shows got renewed, and examined first-season summaries through a comprehensive history titled The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.

They found TV executives tended to renew conventional hit series or shows that were off the beaten track and writing staffs that either had experience working together or very little previously, despite their unremarkable ratings.

“We didn’t find a balanced ‘Goldilocks Effect:’ the executives basically want the porridge to be super hot or super cold,” says Reilly, who co-authored the study with Kelly Patterson and Keyvan Kashkooli, both assistant professors at Santa Clara University. “They want a team whose members have never worked together before, or a team whose members have all worked together — so they look at the extremes. And shows that demonstrate those extremes are more likely to survive to a second season, which is a big investment.”

Interestingly, viewers who aren’t in “the biz” tend to prefer new shows that resemble other sitcoms and pay little attention who is writing them.

Reilly says the findings run counter to the concept of optimal distinctiveness — that is, the ideal mix of familiar and new — which is found in many other areas of entertainment. For example, the pop songs that are most likely to top the Billboard charts might be 66 per cent conventional and 34 percent novel. 

“We found that for a show to survive, it either needs to be super-duper weird, or super-duper conventional,” he says with a laugh. 

So what’s going on? Reilly says execs are trying to find the next show that will go to 100 episodes or more and become syndicated and earn significant money being popular reruns. For example, two of the most popular comedy series of all time — Seinfeld and Cheers — didn’t get great ratings in their first seasons. In fact, Reilly and his team used computational analysis to review first-season synopses of myriad shows, and found Seinfeld was extremely low on the conventionality scale. Still, the TV execs gave it the green light, while others approved highly conventional comedies like Malcolm in the Middle and Two and a Half Men.

“One of the things we surmised from our analysis was that, when something is new, people aren’t quick to adopt it — and sometimes executives champion these shows because they think there’s potential the audience will develop a taste for it. So they’re willing to take risks,” says Reilly, who adds that executives live in fear of turning down the next big hit. “On the other side, audiences really like shows that are conventional in the first season. So the executives attack both sides of that ‘U.’ ” 

Other studies have examined which shows have become commercially successful or positively reviewed, and have looked at their performance through the lens of consumers and critics, but the UBC Sauder study is the first of its kind to look specifically at the decisions high-powered TV executives make. 

What it shows very clearly, Reilly says, is how varied audience perspectives can be, and how consumers and critics often view programs differently than the executives who make them happen. The findings also put a dent into the stereotype that executives are usually the ones choking out creativity, he says, and provide a useful lesson for other creative industries.

“People always think ‘the suits’ are the suppressors of creativity, and that the masses want something new. But in the case of sitcoms, it’s a different story. They’re the ones saying, ‘Let’s give this show an extra chance.’ They’re essentially the people championing weird things,” Reilly says. “So it counters the idea that the suits couldn’t be the ones who foster things that are different.”