Re: Projected \'Crusade\' air dates?
Marty is right. According to JMS's contemporary usenet posts, everyone originally envisaged
Crusade debuting in January 1999, immediately after the debut of
A Call to Arms. The fact that
ACtA was to air right before "Racing the Night" obviated the need to put too much backstory into the first episode, and allowed the series to "hit the ground running".
TNT later decided to make changes to the show, which meant pushing back the series debut date. But they still wanted to run
ACtA in January, and refused to consider rerunning it immediately before series premiered (they thought that would be too soon), so they also demanded a new "first episode" ("War Zone"), chock full of backstory.
Production was shut down for the second and final time in January 1999, before the NBA thing was settled, so the playoffs really weren't a factor in TNT's scheduling decisions. It was more a matter of deciding whether or not to air the show
at all. They finally decided to show the episodes once to recoup some of their production expenses and ran the show for 13 straight weeks in the summer of 1999.
Ironically when they finally did air the show, they ran "War Zone" as the first episode, then
followed it with
A Call to Arms - which made no sense whatsoever.
As Marty also noted, and he knows the ratings biz a lot better than I do,
most U.S. series generally debut in the fall (once upon a time this always meant September, now anywhere from late August until November) and run blocks of new episodes primarily during the broadcast ratings "sweeps" months of November, Feburary, May and June. The sweeps are the only time that local TV station audiences are measured, and that's how their advertising rates are set. Since most local stations are affiliated with national networks, it makes sense for the networks to run major programming during sweeps to help their affiliates. (This also explains why local news shows always do their major investigative reports on local strip clubs and suburban housewives running prostitution rings during sweeps.
)
The networks get ratings
every day based on samples from the largest TV markets, so they aren't as dependent on sweeps as their affiliates - but they do "stunt programming" to help those affiliates. National cable services don't
have affiliates, strictly speaking, so they're less locked into the "sweeps" pattern, and this lets them "counter program" to a degree - running new shows when the networks are primarily showing reruns. Sci-Fi, for instance, tended to do a block of new episodes of its original series during the summer, when the networks were almost all reruns. And its highest-ever rated movies have come in December, when the networks again tend to show reruns. (December is not a sweeps month, and over-all TV viewership tends to be down during the holiday season, while once-a-year "specials" abound. There's no point in "wasting" a new episode of a show by airing it during a time like that.)
With most shows running seasons of between 22 and 26 episodes, the typical "TV year" runs from September to May, with blocks of reruns interspersed. The major exception to this pattern is the "mid-season replacement" series, which will generally replace a ratings-challenged show that debuted the previous September sometime around January. This gives the show time to build an audience going into the February sweeps. The Feb sweeps are less important than the critical November (most important) and May (next most) periods. The July sweeps are the least important of all, as viewership tends to decline during the warm weather and extended daylight hours of summer.
Regards,
Joe
