Nobody here has any idea how much money
B5 makes. It isn't like accountants from Warner Bros. post to this site. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
to produce a b5 episode costs only about half a Star Trek show, and it earned a lot of of money for five years of 22 eps (otherwise it would have been cancelled).
Making money and longevity have little to do with one another in television. You also have to specify
who is making the money and when.
Here is how the financing for a
typical network or
first run syndicated one hour drama or half-hour comedy show works. (To simplify matters I'll use "network" to indicate either an actual broadcast network, a cable channel or a syndicator.)
The show is produced by a studio and sold to a network or syndication company. The show costs the studio "X" per episode to produce, and the network pays "Y" per episode to air it, usually with the right to show each episode two times during its network run. The network makes its money by selling advertising on the show. The higher the ratings (as a rule) the more they can charge for each ad, and the more money they make. The wrinkle in the ratings is something called demographics - demographics looks beyond the raw number of people who watch a show and breaks the audience down by age, gender, income, ethnicity, etc. Some demographic groups are more valuable to advertisers than others. A show that strongly appeals to people 18-49 years of age is attracting the most desired demographic out there - so a show with a 10 rating where 90% of its viewers are 18-49 is worth more to advertisers than one with a 15 rating where 90% of the viewers are 65 and over.
Generally speaking a show will stay on the air as long as it is "performing" for the network - getting good ratings and "demos" for the network and also retaining its audience. The networks would ideally like to see you tune in at 7 or 8 in the evening and never touch your remote again until after
The Tonight Show,
Late Night or
Nightline. A show that loses a big chunk of the audience that its "lead-in" attracted is not performing. A show that
loses a big chunk of its audience when the next show comes up also isn't necessarily performing. Networks try to build up reliable audiences, even if they are niche ones. A well-rated show that doesn't appeal to the people who watch the rest of a network's offerings isn't necessarily a success for that network. (This was one of
B5's problems on TNT. It attracted new viewers to the network, but they rarely watched the shows that aired before and after
B5.)
So it isn't
just a matter of ratings, or even demos, but both are important. Networks will sometimes keep a "marginal" show on the air if it brings good reviews, awards and "prestige". They compete for Emmys almost as fiercely as they compete for ratings points. (Besides, a couple of Emmy awards can translate into more viewers because more people become aware of a show and decide to check it out.)
As long as a series is "performing" in one of these ways, and as long as the network can charge more for the commercials it airs during a show than each episode costs, chances are the show will stay on the air. That's how the
network makes money. During the run of a series the cost of each episode will generally go up every year, as contract-mandated raises kick in, and the studio passes those increases along. A hit show will also mean that actors will renegotiate contracts to get a bigger piece of the larger money pie. At a certain point (usually around the 7 year mark) the cost of carrying a series will exceed the ad profit the network can make from it. This is another reason for cancelling a series.
The
studio almost never makes money while a show is in production. The amount "X" that it costs them to produce each episode is almost always less than the amount "Y" the network is willing to pay to air it. (Because the network can only charge so much for ads.) Therefore the studio loses money the entire time a series is in production. The reason that studios are willing to do this is simple -
reruns.
Once a show has roughly 100 episodes "in the can" there are enough for the studio to sell the show into second-run syndication. (Most stations air reruns "stripped" - 5 days a week. With 100 episodes that means you can run the show for about 5 months before you have to repeat one. With each rerun cycle you tend to lose a few viewers because people have recently seen the shows, so the series will "burn out" at some point. With fewer than 100 episodes series will burn out that much sooner, so syndicators are reluctant to carry shows below that threshold.
Star Trek, in this as in many other ways, was an exception.)
Since the studio owns the series, it gets the syndication fees and the series can pretty quickly go into profit. They also get the home video money and any merchandising cash. So a
successful series does very well for the studio in the long run. But a
flop is a dead loss. If there aren't enough episodes for syndication, the studio loses that part of its investment not covered by the original network fees. These losses must be made good out of revenues that successful series generate. The
Trek franchise quite literally save Paramount more than once because its steady revenue stream off-set losses from flop feature films and TV series.
And, as I noted, other factors can apply. Both Warner Bros. and NBC are going to lose a lot of money on
Friends next year, thanks to the new cast contracts. (Each "Friend" is going to take home almost as much each week as two
B5 episodes cost to film in 1998.) The studio is certain of syndication, international and home video revenues down the road, the network is willing to spend the money to keep the show as an "anchor" for its other, less expensive series. But
Friends is an exception in all sorts of ways.
B5 was also an exception to these rules, but on the other end of the spectrum. PTEN was a "pseudo-network" in which Warner Bros. was a partner. The deal was that Warner Bros. would produce all the shows for the constortium, but to minimize its risks the per episode budget for each had to be equal to or less than the production cost. That's why
B5 had budgets from 1/2 to 1/3 of contemporary
Trek series. Warner Bros. wasn't willing to deficit finance shows that were not on a major network or syndicated in virtually every U.S. city, and which did not have built-in audiences.
So Warner Bros.
broke even on the initial run of
B5, and may even have made a tiny profit at the end of each season. Similarly the PTEN group made
enough on the series to keep it on the air, but nobody was exactly getting rich on it. The
other PTEN series fared even worse, being cancelled one by one until only
B5 was left and the "network" folded. As this inevitable disaster was looming, Warner Bros. sold the rerun rights for the first 88 epiodes to TNT, but probably not for a huge amount.
B5 was nothing like the "brand name" that
Trek was, and never had comparable ratings. It was not as valuable a property.
And we all know the end of the story.
As noted,
B5 S5 had a hard time "fitting in" at TNT.
B5 fans rarely watched whatever preceded the show, and tuned out as soon as
B5 was over. The same applied to the reruns. I think by early 1999 TNT was looking for an excuse to unload
Crusade and picked a fight with JMS to get out of its contract.
Sci-Fi didn't pick up
Rangers for a variety of reasons, as JMS has noted. A big one is that the production model that I described above is being eroded. As ad revenues have declined, production costs have risen, FCC rules changes have allowed networks to produce and own more of their own shows, and cable and satellite channels have proliferated, the economics of TV have been transformed. (Back in the 50s, when the various scandals hit the TV industry, the FCC outlawed the system whereby
advertisers produced and owned TV series, and limited network ownership of production of the shows they aired. This gave rise to the studio/network relationship described above. Changes in the industry have led to FCC to repeal some of those rules, and we're just beginning to see the changes.)
Vertical ownership is also changing things. Most of the studios now own their own TV networks - a move they made to protect themselves from the new FCC rules which would have made the existing networks reluctant to buy shows from outside sources. Fox, Paramount and WB own the networks that bear their names. Disney owns ABC. Universal-Vivendi owns Sci-Fi and USA Networks.
All of these networks would now prefer to run series that they themselves produce, for fairly obvious reasons. Instead of merely making money from advertising during a series's initial run, they can profit from overseas sales, merchandising, syndication and home video sales.
Sci-Fi wanted to own a piece of a
Rangers series. WB didn't want to share. That's why the actors were not signed to a series option when they made the pilot; the two sides had not been able to reach an agreement on a series deal between themselves. They decided to wait for the ratings, which would presumably give one side or the other an edge in the bargaining. But the ratings were muddled. Sci-Fi either wanted to own a piece of
Rangers in order to get the long-term benefits, or they wanted a low enough per-episode licensing fee to make it worth airing without ownership. WB didn't want to share the show, and they didn't want to deficit-finance it on a low-rated cable channel. As JMS has said, if Sci-Fi had owned a piece of
Rangers it probably would have gone to series, even with the marginal ratings. OTOH, if the
Rangers pilot had scored big in the ratings, they probably would have bought the series even without an ownership interest in it.
But as matters stood, there was no compelling reason for them to buy the show. They will be much better off creating cheaper shows or ones based on Universal properties that their parent company already owns. (Like
Battlestar Galactica,
Tremors and
Quantum Leap.) This is especially true given the advertising recession that has been going on since the summer of 2000 and which only got worse after September 11th.
Why is it a "surprise" that the DVDs have been a success when the show already is in the first place?
1) The show wasn't that much of a "success". See above.
2) Historically, prior to the advent of DVD, TV shows have done very poorly on home video in the United States.
Only three series/franchises in the history of U.S. television had successful VHS and/or laserdisc releases prior to 1997: The various
Treks,
The Twilight Zone and
The Outer Limits. All were "cult" shows with over 20 years of exposure and had become a part of the popular culture.
B5 was none of those things. Nonetheless, Warner Bros. did attempt to release the show on both VHS and LD - the first time in its history it had ever released a live action, non-childrens', television series on home video. After initially strong sales, both released tanked and had to be cancelled.
Based on the show's near-invisibility to the mainstream audience, its fraction of the ratings that a
Trek or an
X-Files drew in first run and in reruns, and its total failure on VHS, Warner Bros. had every reason in the world to be dubious about its appeal on DVD. Only intense lobbying by fans got them to release two TV movies as a "test disc." That sold better than they expected it to, despite a total lack of promotion, so they were willing to invest a fair amount of money in a really good first season release - but they were still very unsure about the show's appeal. The test disc had convinced them that they might be able to sell the episodes for the kind of small, steady profit they had earned from the series. But they didn't expect people to snap the set up in
Trek-like numbers - which is exactly what happened.
This message is too long as it is, so I won't discuss your other points and questions. But you should realize that it is called show
business for a reason, and that economic realities, not whims or guesses about a show's popularity in the absence of evidence, is what motivates these decisions. And that
B5 has been profitable for Warner Bros., but almost certainly less so than you are assuming.
Regards,
Joe
