American prime time is a mythical institution. For decades, starting in the middle of the 20th century, the three original broadcast networks – NBC, ABC and CBS – devoted three hours every evening, every day of the week, from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM, to the best of human content creation. American culture, and as its extension world culture, was shaped around this institution. The series that defined American society, that often redefined it, were all there, in prime time.
Lucy My Love, Rawhide, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bonanza, Star Trek, The Mary Taylor Moore Show, Blues for the Blues, Dallas, St. Elsewhere, Free at the Bar, Twin Peaks, Law and Order, Seinfeld, Will and Grace, Friends, The Office, Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Good Wife, The Big Bang Theory and dozens if not hundreds of formative and influential series emerged in what was for years the important cultural tribe generation Most – prime time American broadcast.
Although when new broadcast networks arrived, Fox, UPN and WB (the latter two later merged into The CW), they settled for two hours of prime time, but the Big Three continued unchanged. Prime time remained important even with the rise of premium cable networks, which broadcast their most watched original programs.
However, changes that have occurred in the last decade in the television market – centered on the rise of Netflix and other streaming services – are disrupting and collapsing the dominance of prime time. Today, the broadcast time of a new episode in the series is no longer important. The ritual of waiting weekly for a favorite series and gathering in front of the ground on the designated day and at the designated time in order to watch the episode together with the rest of the country belongs to the past. The whole idea of linear viewing is delusional and strange to kids born into the age of Netflix and VOD. Just recently, while on vacation in a hotel, I had to explain to my 6-year-old son why on the hotel TV you can’t choose which series you want to watch and you have to be content with what is being broadcast at that moment.
And yet, the major breakfast networks have not abandoned their commitment to prime time. They continued to produce valuable original content for him, three hours a day, seven days a week, even when the most talented creators went to cable and streaming, taking with them the awards, the sympathy of the critics and the audience, leaving behind mostly formulaic series about doctors, policemen or lawyers, dose More and more reality, and live sports broadcasts (perhaps the only reason for linear viewing). It is expensive, burdensome, requires many resources and no longer provides the same results as before – but prime time remains.
Only recently, belatedly and very slowly, do the major broadcast networks seem to be beginning to rethink the necessity of prime time. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal from last week, NBC, historically perhaps the most influential of the broadcast networks, is considering giving up the last prime time hour – 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. – and transferring responsibility for it to the local stations that carry its broadcasts, or advance the broadcast time of Jimmy Fallon’s Light Night show. The internal discussions on the subject are still in the initial stages and in any case a change will not be implemented before the fall of 2023.
Giving up a third of the network’s prime time hours means a substantial cut in the number of prime time programs, which can be reflected in considerable financial savings. According to sources at the network, this is exactly the goal: dropping one hour of prime time every day of the week could save NBC tens of millions of dollars in spending on content and promotion and marketing. It will also involve quite a few difficult decisions about which old series to give up and fewer orders for new series.
This could be described as a blow to the television content industry, were it not for the fact that there are already people filling in the gaps – and more so. The content expenses of the streaming services more than offset the decrease in broadcast expenses. According to an analysis by Ampere Analysis, published in the Financial Times, in 2023 the five largest streaming services – Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and HBO Max – are expected to spend $23 billion on original content productions. This is twice as much as the shared expenses in 2019, although only a moderate increase of 10% compared to 2022.
In any case, while the broadcast networks are cutting expenses and focusing on the expected content that delivers the goods – formula series, sports and reality – the streaming companies are going big and pouring billions on productions that put Hollywood movies to shame. Did you think the $200 million that HBO poured into Dragon House was impressive? Wait until you see what Amazon did with the Lord of the Rings prequel, whose first season cost almost half a billion dollars to produce.
The highest content expenditures are found among the actresses who are trying to take a leading position in the competition against Netflix. According to Ampere Analysis data, the highest spending in 2023 will be HBO Max, which is expected to spend about 6.5 billion dollars on original content productions (the numbers do not refer to the entire content budget of the company, which includes, among other things, the purchase of licenses to broadcast content from other companies and can be much higher More). It is followed by Amazon with just over 5 billion and Disney+ with about 5.5 billion, while Netflix settles for fourth place with just over 3.5 billion (almost unchanged compared to 2022). Apple, which takes a selective approach of quality at the expense of quantity, closes the list with approximately 3.2 billion dollars in spending on original content.
However, it wasn’t just the money and creative freedom offered by the streaming platforms that killed prime time. It was also 20 years ago, when HBO and Showtime re-dictated what television content looked like – and it was then that the broadcast networks’ prime time had some of its best days, both in terms of creativity and audience appeal. Elements such as ease of viewing, from any device and at any time, are also used as a supporting explanation only.
The trump card of the streaming services – what really destroys prime time – is their success in bringing mass audiences. Before Netflix and the others, creators had two main choices: lots of broadcast viewers but creative freedom and limited budgets or few cable viewers with creative freedom and wide budgets. Although there were exceptions – Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad (the last one can be contested, because the series only became popular thanks to its inclusion on Netflix) – but the general rule held until streaming services arrived.
These services bring a global and diverse audience that the broadcast networks cannot reach, and the budgets and creative freedom that only HBO and Showtime have previously promised. When this is the case, creators, actors and viewers have less and less to look for in the broadcast networks – and even fewer reasons to do it in prime time. In light of this, the discussions at NBC about cutting the broadcast by a third seem not only understandable, but it’s hard not to wonder how it hasn’t happened yet and why the other networks aren’t promoting similar moves.
By the way, even though we may be at the end of the prime time era, we shouldn’t worry too much about the networks that created it. They are all part of huge entertainment corporations that run their own streaming services. ABC and FOX are owned by Disney, which operates Disney+ and Hulu; CBS is part of the Paramount Corporation which owns Paramount+; And NBC, part of the Comcast-controlled NBCUniversal Corporation, has Peacock. In the end, as prime time disappears, it is only a matter of transferring budgets and content between different units in the same corporation. The only difference is how we consume them.