Setting its sights lower, Sony takes another swing

While hardly the kind of anniversary that merits champagne and flowers, it was one year ago this week that Sony announced plans to shut down its network TV unit, cutting loose writers tethered to the studio by lucrative “development deals” and laying off roughly a fifth of its television-related employees.

Today, if not quite a phoenix rising from the ashes, the since-renamed Sony Pictures Television is alive and making deals, while the studio -- indeed, the whole industry -- tries to discern if it’s possible to run something as confounding as prime-time television like a normal business.

Sony’s odyssey is more than a mere academic exercise, but rather symbolizes the puzzle with which the industry is grappling, one whose final resolution will dramatically influence network schedules in the years ahead. Because the bottom line, in an industry devoted to it, is that networks and studios will be less inclined to give us splashy dramas and star-driven sitcoms if they can’t afford to make them, inevitably leading to the proliferation of cheaper, unscripted shows like “Fear Factor” and “The Bachelor” to fill out their lineups.

This equation, combined with the networks’ penchant for supplying their own programming, has gradually taken its toll on independent TV producers, most of which were either absorbed by bigger players or folded their tents before Sony joined the procession.

Still, seeing an entity with the Japanese conglomerate’s vast resources forced to retreat -- and resort to significant staff cutbacks -- was a major wake-up call that the old way of doing business was broken, and set off tremors from Burbank to Malibu.

Borrowing baseball terminology, that system has always been about home runs. Studios traditionally took plenty of at-bats with new shows and struck out more often than not in pursuit of the next elusive blockbuster -- from “Home Improvement” and “Seinfeld” to “ER” and “CSI” -- that more than pays for all the failures.

Sony had employed this strategy along with everyone else. In the past decade or so, the studio produced roughly 180 prime-time prototypes, or pilots. Of those, only five -- “Mad About You,” “The Nanny,” “Party of Five,” “Dawson’s Creek,” and “King of Queens” -- became series that endured long enough to generate 100 episodes, the requisite number to cash in by selling reruns into syndication.

Despite being a major studio, Sony also played this long-odds game of long ball with a significant handicap. Federal law prohibits a foreign company from owning more than 25% of a broadcast property. So while Viacom and Disney gobbled up CBS and ABC, respectively, and quickly filled those networks with their own productions, Sony found itself increasingly relegated to the sidelines.

Sony sought to counter this dynamic by paying millions to sign deals with established writers and producers, assuming networks would clamor to be in business with them. The hits, however, didn’t keep pace with that investment, and eventually the corporate types decided to clean house.

All of which brings us to the present and the studio’s one-time head of program distribution, Sony Pictures Television President Steve Mosko, who has spent the last year trying to figure out how to apply new math, as it were, to the TV business.

Not surprisingly, given the calendar, Mosko returned to the baseball analogy.

“I don’t think our success is predicated on hitting the home run,” he said during an interview at the studio in Culver City. “We’re like the Angels. We have to execute the basics better than anyone else. And if we do that, we’ll be successful.”

In fact, Sony was never really out of the television business. The company produces a wide variety of programs, among them the tandem of “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!,” the daytime soaps “Days of Our Lives” and “The Young and the Restless” and cable series such as “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” which the company is offering to local TV stations for 2003. Sony is also developing a series with the popular online auction site EBay.

Still, trying to tackle network prime time had left mighty Sony gasping for air. Sure, there were ongoing shows such as “King of Queens” and “The Guardian,” but all the studio ended up doing, ultimately, was throw money at a longshot business.

Mosko said Sony executives have spent the last year deciding what makes sense, trying to “look at the business in a much more financially disciplined way” and find models where Sony can deliver solid singles and doubles without needing to swing for the fences.

Recently, that has included inching back into prime time, from a proposed comedy series that Adam Sandler would produce for the WB network to a new drama for Fox from the producers of “Party of Five.”

“It took us some number of months, as it related specifically to network prime time, to sort of come to how we would approach it,” said Russ Krasnoff, Sony’s president of programming and production. “The notion was, can we apply the creative and financial discipline that we had in cable to the network business, but they’re not always equivalent.”

“We’re trying to be smarter about how we produce ... so you don’t have to have ‘Seinfeld’-type numbers just to break even,” Mosko added.

A few recent factors may also have been to Sony’s advantage. In keeping with Hollywood tradition, the networks simply went nuts with nepotism, voraciously buying projects from sister studios. Although this sounds great in theory, when shows fail, as most do, all that means is the network loses money on two fronts -- both as broadcaster and producer.

Networks still want to produce most of their programs and reap the benefits of owning hits, but even ABC executives admitted they didn’t do themselves any favors this year by letting Disney produce roughly 90% of their series candidates.

A related issue, meanwhile, is the fact that those networks which own studios seldom trust studios that own competing networks to treat them squarely -- a bit of paranoia given teeth when 20th Century Fox moved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” from the WB to UPN.

As a result, Sony gets to position itself as Switzerland, a neutral combatant, friendly to all. “We’re everybody’s second-favorite supplier,” Krasnoff said. “The favorite is themselves, without question. But we’re second.”

Of course, “we’re No. 2” is hardly the kind of proud banner one expects to see flying in a ballpark, much less a corporate prospectus. Still, in a TV business in which singles are about the most anyone can realistically aspire to, the rules of the game are changing, a reality that is altering the view on the field, and from the cheap seats.