Anyone else see the growing irony in this? TV Land is a cable network that replays series that once were huge hits on the broadcast networks -- when those networks knew how to regularly schedule the kinds of shows people just never skipped.
Look at the TV Land schedule and you'll see series like M*A*S*H, All in the Family, The Cosby Show and Roseanne. People rearranged their lives to watch series like these. It's a schedule full of hit sitcoms produced for the TV generation -- once a must-have demographic group that eventually aged too much for the broadcasters to care much about.
OK. That has been the strategy since the cable network signed on in the '90s. But since the June premiere of Hot in Cleveland, TV Land has escalated the contest several notches. It has started producing the kinds of series the Old Giants once liked. TV Land plays them to any and all disenchanted "elders" who can't find quite the same satisfaction in what's run today on the networks that used to chase after them.
The broadcast networks want viewers in their mid-20s, explained TV Land President Larry W. Jones in a recent interview. "We're trying to attract a demographic in their 40s."
Jones said the good ratings for Everybody Loves Raymond after it started running on his network more than a year ago made him think very seriously about producing TV Land's own crop of scripted comedy series that would "tap into a whole world of lifestyle subject matter."
"We put out the word that we're open for business," he said, and his team started meeting with producers. One meeting was with the people behind Hot in Cleveland -- though that show wasn't first on their pitch list. Jones said the producers first talked about a few reality shows before they told him about a comedy featuring four "women of a certain age" who decide to replace their vapid Los Angeles lives for the more the palatable lifestyle in Cleveland.
Jones sensed a good idea, he said, and ordered a pilot script. When casting started, the decision was made to go with actresses who have a strong record: Betty White (Mary Tyler Moore Show, Golden Girls); Wendie Malick (Just Shoot Me); Jane Leeves (Frasier), and Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time).
Cleveland is the kind of series TV Land's research showed disenchanted over-thirties were searching for, Jones said: the multi-camera, live-audience, sharply written program reminiscent of network-level fare before the weight-losers, singers, dancers and sword-swallowers grabbed the spotlight.
"We're not afraid of traditional," he said.
And many fans of "traditional" seem to like what they have seen. TV Land said 4.4 million people watched the first-season finale last week. After that finale aired, The Nielsen Company estimated the average first-season viewership for Hot in Cleveland as 3.1 million viewers, including 1.4 million adults age 25-54.
And Mediaweek recently reported: "Ignited by Hot in Cleveland, TVLand.com rose to a record 923,000 unique visitors for the month of June 2010 -- up 62 percent from the comparable year-ago month."
Not really surprising, then, that after just a few episodes into its 10-show commitment, Hot in Cleveland was renewed for a 20-episode second season. When it returns, it will be joined by another newly produced traditional sitcom when it returns.
Retired at 35 stars George Segal as the father of a 35-year-old who gives up a pressured New York City life to move to his parents' Florida retirement home. The search for a third series is active, Jones said. Now that the word is out, even more producers are contacting TV Land with offerings. Out of "a large number of scripts," two shows will be turned into pilots and plans are to have the one that wins that race on the air by June 2011.
No, it's not a revolution, this TV Land trend. But when other cable networks, in a desperate search for identity, are sinking into deeper sludge -- guy who eats too much (Man V. Food), the guy who eats the wrong stuff (Bizarre Foods) and dubious dog gastronomy (My Dog Ate What?) -- it's encouraging to know that somebody interprets the word "taste" the way it SHOULD be defined.