Tuesday's New York Times includes an excellent Bill Carter story about the ramifications of CBS moving its drama The Good Wife from Tuesdays to Sundays this season, making it subject to East Coast time delays from pro football overruns. CBS executives say that, in getting the word out about the annoying time shifts, they're "doing about everything we can."
No, they're not. They're not doing the most obvious and important thing.
They're not moving The Good Wife away from Sundays...
Granted, there are only another few months of this problem, at which time the football season would be over and The Good Wife would run, reliably and on time, in its 9 p.m. ET Sunday time slot. But in the meantime, The Good Wife is losing both momentum and audience. According to the article, the series has averaged about 10.5 million viewers for its first six episodes this season, a drop of nearly 2 million viewers from last year's Tuesday average.
One of the CBS strategies for fixing this problem is to encourage viewers to double the recording time on their DVRs to handle the possible Sunday delayed broadcasts. Set your DVRs to record from 9-11 p.m. ET on Sundays, CBS suggests on its website. "That way, if The Good Wife is delayed 20 or 30 minutes, you will still get the whole show."
Great advice -- if this were, say, 1980. But just as TV sets are no longer made with vacuum tubes, broadcast network television itself, with all the variety of viewing alternatives available, no longer exists in a vacuum.
As an avid viewer of quality television, I'm more fortunate than most viewers of Sunday evening television. Some programs, I get in advance, so don't have to record. Also, my profession allows me special dispensation to receive both East and West Coast programming from the various broadcast networks. Plus, I have two TiVos -- one connected to cable, the other to DirecTV -- each capable of recording two programs at the same time.
Yet even with all that, it's all I can do to record everything I want to watch. (By the time I've seen all those Sunday shows, and caught up, it's usually Wednesday. But that's a different issue.) And if I took CBS's advice regarding The Good Wife, I'd have no chance in hell of catching everything in my personal TV recording net. And that's me: Mr. "ICTV4U"...
Most viewers, if they have a DVR attached to their satellite or cable system, are lucky if they can record two programs simultaneously, and don't have the luxury of broadcast TV time-shifting. So what does CBS's self-serving advice do to them?
This most recent Sunday, it would have given them a block that did, indeed, capture The Good Wife, along with -- depending upon their home city -- either all or half of the show that followed, CSI: Miami.
But at 9 p.m. ET, the official time slot of The Good Wife, other programs running at that hour included new episodes of AMC's The Walking Dead, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, Showtime's Dexter and even ABC's Desperate Housewives and the PBS Masterpiece drama Page Eight, starring Bill Nighy.
That last offering was a two-hour drama, also filling the 10 p.m. ET hour that CBS suggested Good Wife fans keep recording on CBS just in case. But also at that hour, there's Showtime's Homeland, HBO's Hung, and, if only for the curious, the premiere of AMC's Hell on Wheels.
That's just way too crowded a field -- especially for a serialized drama such as The Good Wife, which contains intricate shifts in personal relationships almost every week.
CBS, instead of doing what CBS executive Kelly Kahl calls "about everything we can" to support The Good Wife, should do everything, period. Move the show away from Sunday.
Where? Just about anywhere.
Swap it with Hawaii Five-O, which now runs at 10 p.m. ET Mondays. Or with Unforgettable, which now occupies its old Tuesday 10 p.m. ET slot. Or on Wednesdays, slide CSI: Crime Scene Investigation down to 9 p.m. ET, put The Good Wife in at 10, and move the much less watchable Criminal Minds from 9 p.m. Wednesdays to the same hour on Sundays.
Or, you could swap The Good Wife with Person of Interest on Thursdays. Fridays comes with its own problems for dramas with serialized stories -- if people have a life, and go out on Fridays (I've heard it happens), it's not a good way to build or maintain viewer loyalty. And Saturdays, until and unless the broadcast networks adopt an "If we build it, they will come" approach, is a rerun gulag.
But four nights out of seven would be better places for The Good Wife than where CBS has put it now. The program has won Emmys, snared a large audience and impressed critics by being a smart, entertaining series about the law and the people who practice it. But instead of rewarding The Good Wife for that, CBS has punished it, by putting it on Sundays and asking viewers to set its recorders, or adjust their viewing habits, more flexibly.
CBS is the party that needs to be the flexible one here. Make the good move -- and move The Good Wife.