This Season’s Duds Very Well May Kill Network TV’s Fall Premiere Model Once And For All

I’m about halfway through the pilots for the upcoming fall network premiere season, which starts on September 24. It’s been a slog (still, though, a fine way to make a living!). After a summer of reviewing shows on streaming and cable from all over the world for the Stream It Or Skip It column, I feel like I’ve been transported back to a world where the only choices for scripted shows six out of seven days of the week were what was on the Big Four networks, but even duller and sloppier than shows were in the ’90s.

Predictable plots. Clumsy dialogue. Stiff and guessable procedural mysteries. Big sitcom jokes that fall flat despite the guffawing laugh track. Premises that feel uninspired and derivative. It feels like the networks just went through the motions, picking shows that wouldn’t rock any boats or piss off any potential viewers.

It feels like, unless there’s a surprise, that all of these shows will likely not survive the year. It’s been like this for the last decade, but only in the last few does it feel like the old fashioned network system of dumping most of their new shows out during two weeks in the fall feel like it’s finally run its course.

It’s hard to watch a something like New Amsterdam on NBC, for instance, after watching more innovative and interesting fare this summertime. High-profile releases like Sharp Objects, lower-profile ones like Lodge 49 and international ones like Safe Harbour, Ghoul and Ultraviolet all seemed like they were created with lots of care and thought. Then I watch New Amsterdam —an eye-rolling medical show saved only by Ryan Eggold’s well-developed ability to emote via raised eyebrows and smirks— and I wonder how the networks keep shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to their fall offerings.

(New Amsterdam is actually outdone in the predictably annoying department by FBI, God Friended Me and Magnum, P.I. Not surprisingly, CBS is one of the worst offenders in this regard.)

It’s not just about the fact that cable and streaming shows can use language, sex and violence more than network shows can. That’s just an excuse; the need to write around restrictions tends to lead to creative solutions that make a show better.

No, it’s the process that no longer works. Just to give a quick overview: Every spring during pilot season, networks get pitched over a hundred scripted shows. From those pitches, they order pilot scripts from the show’s creators. After going through those scripts, they winnow it down to about three dozen shows that go to pilot. And from those pilots they select the 12-15 shows they pick up and add to their schedule the following season.

Sounds pretty inefficient and expensive, doesn’t it? It seems especially inefficient in an era where people have gotten used to the fact that a streaming service or cable network orders an entire 6-12 episode first season of a show, airs or streams it in its entirety, then decides whether to bring it back. It feels like the money networks and studios spend to create pilots that never get on the air or episodes that never see the light of day due to quick cancellations could go to more straight-to-series orders with shorter seasons.

It’s not like networks don’t do this right now. While some of the shows that they premiere throughout the season are holdovers from their fall development slate, they’ve dabbled more than ever in cable-and-streaming-like programming models. Ongoing series like This Is Us, The Good Place and How To Get Away With Murder purposely run shorter seasons for creative reasons, and the Big Four have had no problem dabbling with limited-run anthology series like American Crime and Wayward Pines.

The idea that a show is going to hit it big, like last year’s The Good Doctor (which I hated, and my opinion didn’t change much through the season) is more luck than anything else. Most shows will draw audiences between 3 or 4 million viewers. With the networks owning the studios that create their shows, they know that they can make audiences that small work for them, whether it’s via international sales or streaming rights, because they don’t have to split the profits with a studio.

So why the big rush just to get something on the air? Why not take the time to develop a show that actually feels like it was crafted instead of churned out of a Xerox machine? Why not continue to develop relationships with amazing showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Kenya Barris, Ryan Murphy and others by giving them the same creative freedoms that they’re going to get in their new deals at Netflix?

Yes, the networks need a lot more programming than cable channels do, and they can’t throw dump trucks full of cash at the problem like Netflix and Amazon have done, at least not without pushback. But the networks have also proven that they can work within the system that cable and streaming created.

It’s time for them to go all in and develop shows year round and build more intimate relationships with showrunners; otherwise, the stuff you see in September and October is just going to get more and more terrible.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.