Upfront week is winding down, with the CW having rolled out its lineup. As Entertainment Weekly points out, the schedule is straight out of the early 90s. A quick look:

(New series in bold)

Monday:

8-9 pm: Gossip Girl

9-10 pm: One Tree Hill

Tuesday:

8-9 pm: 90210

9-10 pm: Melrose Place

Wednesday:

8-9 pm: America’s Next Top Model

9-10 pm: The Beautiful Life

Thursday:

8-9 pm: The Vampire Diaries

9-10 pm: Supernatural

Friday:

8-9 pm: Smallville

9-10pm: America’s Next Top Model (Encore)

(Reuters photo of “Gossip Girl” star Blake Lively)

For those of you unable to make it to the Fox upfront today at the New York City Center (or skipped it and went straight to the party), here are some of the takeaways:

• Fox introduced its four new comedies and two dramas to its prime-time lineup, plus the Wanda Sykes show on Saturday nights. The best looking of the bunch was “Glee” — a cutting comedy, musical feel-good hour that has received some big hype. The show may be deserving, if the clip played for media, advertisers and affiliates today is any indication. It got a rousing cheer from the crowd.
• But not as rousing as the cheer for Kiefer Sutherland, who showed up (as he often does) to thank everyone for their support of “24.” He wrapped up by saying, “I don’t want to take up much more of your time, because I know you can’t wait to get to the party. It promises to be a good one. I will be looking for you… at the bar.” Nice one, Kiefer.
• Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly and Sales President Jon Nesvig took pains to remind the audience that broadcast network TV is not yet dead, and in fact still blows away cable TV and online video. They sounded a bit like newspaper executives. “All the noise and data I’ve seen over the last six months tells a great story about network television,” Reilly said. “Network TV is still the biggest branding opportunity out there.”
• Peter Rice, the new chairman of Fox Entertainment, made an appearance. The executive behind movies like “Slumdog Millionaire” as well as “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Juno,” and “Little Miss Sunshine” sounded happy as a clam to be over on the TV side of the business.  “In movies it just takes forever to finish a film. You can spend years, literally years, working on screenplays. Then another year shooting and editing. And perhaps as much as a year marketing. And when it hits the theaters, you all cross your fingers and hope it can do $100 million. If it does $100 million, you breathe a sigh of relief and throw a big party and it’s front page news,” Rice pointed out. “In the last eight weeks, I’ve come to realize that a $100 million movie actually translates to about 10 million people. That’s 10 million viewers. And that’s an average number of people who watch Fox every single night. With a show like ‘American Idol’ we deliver 26 million people from stage to screen at light-speed. Think about that: On Tuesday, ‘Idol’ reaches that total number of people who saw ‘Ironman.’  And then it follows it up the next night with the number of people who saw ‘Harry Potter.’ Those movies take weeks to amass that audience.

(Photo: Reuters)

How do you sell TV advertising in this environment? If you’re Scripps Networks, you trumpet the product integration available in your make-over and do-it-yourself programs. You also make no bones about how difficult things are for advertisers and consumers.

At Tuesday’s Scripps upfront presentation (held at Cipriani 42nd Street), executives talked about these “very difficult and challenging times” and described viewers as “disillusioned,” “anxious,” and “frustrated.”

“There has never been a more important time than right now to reach out to viewers about their homes” said one Scripps executive.

Of course, Scripps is in a different spot than many other networks. Home to HGTV, The Food Network, DIY Network, Fine Living Network, and Great American Country, many of its shows are highly aspirational and played to an eager audience when money was flowing and houses were flying off the market.

Now the media company is betting that viewers will look to shows like “The Unsellables” or “For Rent” or “Income Property” as they trudge through the recession.

As HGTV President Jim Samples told the crowd of ad executives and press, “audiences look to us as an authority and they look to us for answers to their questions.”

Now, if you’re the Lifetime Networks, you take a completely different approach to this upfront season. As one executive said to me, “You don’t want to be too flashy, and you don’t want to be too depressing.”

In fact, at the Lifetime luncheon, held in a more modest room in the Hearst Tower, there was almost no mention of the current economic situation. Instead, executives chose to concentrate on the programming slate at the female-focused cable network.

The headliner was the arrival of unscripted fashion competition “Project Runway” this season, a show that Lifetime CEO Andrea Wong said she was “absolutely thrilled” to welcome to the network.

Wong has made no secret of her wish to bring big names to Lifetime, and Tuesday’s presentation gave her a chance to run through a list of well-known Hollywood stars who can be seen on Lifetime channels, either in returning shows and movies or new ones: Kim Delaney, Valerie Bertinelli, Cybill Shepherd, Joan Cusack, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ashton Kutcher, Julia Ormond, Gina Gershon, Rob Lowe, Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen, among others, will soon be turning up on Lifetime Network or Lifetime Movie Network.

As it turned out, Allen made one of the only references to the economy, saying it is a “tough time to make movies” and an “even tougher time to make movies about women.”

(Reuters photo of Joan Allen at the UK premiere of the Bourne Ultimatum in Leicester Square in London August 15, 2007)

How bad is the advertising market? Pretty bad, says Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman. And it’s only going to get uglier.

“It is clear that while as cable network owners we are in a more favorable media segment than most, advertising comps are likely to get worse before they get better,” he said on a conference call today.

This comment may seem dry, but we’re totally ready to cut him some slack since it came shortly after this poetic gem: “And despite the orgy of pessimism prevalent of the late, the economic tide in our economy and our industry will rise again.”

Dauman, whose job means he oversees MTV, VH-1, Comedy Central and so on, assessed the situation this way: Advertisers who committed dollars during the upfront for the first quarter are holding solid, but are getting shaky for the second quarter.

Viacom finance whiz Tom Dooley expanded on that. “In terms of second-quarter option exercises, many of the moves have been shifting dollars from quarter-to-quarter. Some advertisers have done so but come back later in the quarter to make smaller buys in the scatter market. It is this activity combined with the overall economic trends which leads us to believe that ad market will get worse before it gets better.”

Not exactly an orgy of optimism, guys.

(Photo: Reuters)

Tired of all those commercials? Don’t have a DVR? Fox reckons it has something for you. Forget the name (they’re calling it Remote Free TV) and concentrate on the concept: a big tentpole drama with half the normal commercials and promotional time.

Fox will first try out this idea with “Fringe,” an FBI, mystery, science-fiction, thriller, supernatural drama from J.J. Abrams that’s rolling out this fall.  Come midseason, it will do the commercial shrinking thing with ”Dollhouse” from Joss Whedon, who was behind teen supernatural hit “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Liguori — after calling his network scrappy and populist — told advertisers at the upfront that he refused to let things get boring. “We’re the number one network. We’re the rebel innovators.”

Here’s his plan: “With both of our scheduled dramas of the season, we’re going to try something different, something a little unusual. We are going to redefine the viewing experience. All season long we’ll air these two series with less commercials, less promotional time, and above all, less reason to grab the remote and change the channel.”

What’s that mean? ”These two series will run with half the normal commercial and promotional time all season long,” he said. “Some people might think this is a scary financial prospect. We really see it as an investment. We need to give viewers a new reason to come to broadcast TV.”

Sure, viewers may love it. We’ll see what advertisers have to say. 

(Reuters photo of Peter Liguori)

In one of the busiest weeks for network TV executives, NBCU’s Jeff Zucker nonetheless stopped by an Avenue A/Razorfish event for a question-and-answer session with the ad company’s vice president of media & entertainment, Domenic Venuto.

Not surprisingly, given it is upfront week, one of the first questions put to Zucker centered on his media company’s rather untraditional upfront.

(A quick refresher: NBC unveiled its lineup for 2008-09 last month, and Monday skipped its usual splashy upfront presentation at Radio City in favor of what it called the NBCU Experience over at 30 Rockefeller Center. For more details click here). 

Zucker said that while the Experience wasn’t perfect, it was certainly a success and accomplished what he had hoped, namely showing off the company’s businesses beyond the NBC network.

“I feel very, very good about how we did on Monday,” said Zucker, before joking that it was unlikely someone would roast the event to his face.

“Nobody ever wants to tell me the truth,” he cracked. “On Monday, what most people said, and many were probably drunk, is thanks and congratulations on doing something different.”

“But, really, the feedback was really positive,” he told the crowd.

He said the same thing on another topic: the reaction to video sharing site Hulu. 

“The user experience is fantastic,” he said. “That has been the No. 1 goal.”

But success comes at some cost, Zucker said.

“Frankly, all of our internal sites have a lot to learn from what Hulu has done.”

(Photo: Reuters)

Much has been made about ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS taking a low-key approach to their upfront presentations this year. Still, ABC brought out Jimmy Kimmel for a few jokes in a reminder of what these events were like in past years.

Here are a few of Kimmel’s better lines for advertisers:

- This year, as you’ve noticed, we scaled back a lot. There’s no party, no food. ABC may be the worst date ever. We expect you to put out and we’re not even buying you a drink.

- We’ve decided to concentrate less on the afterparty and more on shows that aren’t ‘Cavemen.’

- By the way, there’s about a 40 percent chance you’ll see me at the Fox upfront on Thursday.

- Here at ABC we are very excited about both our new shows.

- TV sets are bigger than ever, kids are fatter than ever and gas has never been more expensive. We have the whole country on their couches right now. If we can’t sell them stuff, we should all be very ashamed of ourselves.

(Reuters photo of Jimmy Kimmel hosting 2007 ESPY Awards)

Why have prime-time network TV advertising prices been so strong in the scatter market — up in the double digits — after a rather lackluster upfront in 2007?

ABC’s head of sales, Mike Shaw, offered a few answers for the discrepancy between the shorter term scatter market and the longer term upfronts.  But he said a lot of it can be blamed on networks selling advertising too cheaply in last year’s upfront.

Shaw said he’d rather see a far smaller gap in prices between the two markets. “I’d like to see less of a swing in the pendulum between the upfront market and the scatter,” he told reporters after ABC unveiled a very modest 2008-09 schedule.

This year, however, the networks could face a big pushback if they try to raise prices, given the state of the economy. Shaw, while saying it was too early to predict, nonetheless seemed relatively confident when asked about upfront pricing. “We don’t see a huge change in the short term,” he said of advertising budgets.

One reason is that Shaw believes it has been “proven again and again” that companies would do better to advertise their way through an economic downturn, rather than risk losing brand recognition and customers with marketing cutbacks. “It’s much wiser to maintain share,” he said.

As for timing of deals this year (some buyers are predicting a big slowdown), Shaw said ABC had talked with advertisers but that didn’t necessarily indicate actual deals would be reached more quickly or slowly than normal.

“We’ve had conversations, but that’s not new. If you wanted to go out and write early money, you could.”

(Photo: ABC)

For years we have interviewed media analyst/newsletter editor/industry maven Jack Myers about the television upfronts. We have tried to track him down at upfront parties, cocktail napkin in hand, to get his initial reaction on the new shows trotted out by the networks while he talks to the most senior executives. We have written up his forecasts and predictions on how many billions of advertising dollars the nets will say they have booked.

And now, in what may be the most definitive sign that more than 50 years of upfront fanfare has come to an end, Myers says he will no longer prognosticate on their outcome, according to an e-mail newsletter sent round today:

This year, I am not offering predictions nor will I report after-the-fact on network Upfront revenues. The Upfront is no longer a representative indicator of network performance and the information released by the networks is, at best, questionable. If a network ever actually reports poor performance in the Upfront, then we can be assured it was a disaster.

The change of heart makes sense given the total overhaul of the television industry. Networks are selling more and more advertising for shows not only when they appear on air, but on the Internet as well. A television writers’ strike over the winter that brought pilot production to a standstill means they have very few shows to preview to advertisers this year. The introduction of a new ratings system to account for DVR use has wreaked havoc on the numbers used to set advertising rates.

And of course, there’s the economy.

But we are definitely sad to hear this from Jack, whose predictions were so on target:

My own performance has generally been on-the-money, although last year I believed the market would be considerably softer than it, in fact, turned out to be.

Aside from the specific revenue forecasts, Myers does give general conclusions about the state of upfront negotiations. Based on his talks with industry leaders, he sees a reasonably quick haggling season that should end before the July 4 holiday weekend. He expects the networks to boost their CPM pricing and incremental revenue from their new digital distribution models.

(Photo: Reuters / ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” at the more festive 2007 upfronts)

Instead of a big, crazy upfront presentation at Radio City, NBC Universal this year invited advertisers and media to its Experience at 30 Rockefeller Center. Here’s a guided tour:

First off, you’re greeted by a TV screen featuring clips from NBC stars like Tina Fey and Brian Williams, who make some jokes and ham it up and basically tell you to move along, which you were really going to do anyway since you’re just standing there in the hallway.

There really isn’t a lot to see in the first few rooms (promotional videos, etc) except that walking around are a bunch of people dressed in all black with, if you can picture it, video screens on their chests.

The screens had games that you could play; one told you what character you’d be in “The Office,” and another asked you some trivia questions (I approached it like school, took some wild guesses and got two out of three).

Things soon picked up. First a screening room featuring trailers of some of the upcoming releases like “Momma Mia” and “The Incredible Hulk,” then a “Deal or No Deal” exhibit featuring the gameshow’s models walking about in sequined red dresses.

And later there was KITT, the car from Knight Rider; a couple huge American Gladiators doing battle with one of those stuffed medieval looking weapons; a mock voting booth (the computer was on the blink when I walked past, so nobody was actually casting a vote); dozens of TVs showing scenes from the Olympics; a Champagne bar.

Plus, there were a ton of giveaways, which usually please a crowd. Here’s what was pushed at me: USA Network M&Ms; a “Today” earth-friendly bag; a picture between two mummies (they don’t look very frightening, I look sort of confused); a little taster of duck and mushroom from the “Top Chef” booth; a “Friday Night Lights” button; a golf ball; a chocolate bar, and a football signed by Tiki Barber, John Madden, Cris Collingsworth, Jerome “The Bus” Bettis, and Al Michaels.

I also got a picture with Janice Dickinson, who was there promoting her show on Oxygen and inviting all comers to jump up on the stage with her and snap a photo. So I did. Why not?

Unfortunately, the picture didn’t take the first time, so I had to get back up on Ms. Dickinson’s stage for another attempt. She was very kind about it (”Oh, I screwed it up on purpose, so you’d come back,” she joked) though the scene was still a little awkward and I found myself wishing that I’d just skipped that particular stop.

But none of that — the entertainment, the giveaways, the shift away from the traditional upfront — means much in the end. What counts is not whether advertisers enjoyed the NBC Universal Experience, but whether they’ll hand over the big bucks for commercial deals.

(Photo of Rockefeller Center: Reuters)