When
Texas Enter- tainment News launched last fall, the Austin-based syndicated
infotainment show operated under a charter mandate of “Entertain, Inform, and
Inspire.” Today, in hiatus after only a 33-show run, TEN‘s goals are
different: perhaps more along the lines of “Return, Endure, Survive.”
Officially, TEN creator Fred Miller plans for the program to make a
comeback just after the first of the year. But what happened to the glitzy news
show, that with its 15 statewide affiliates and a production crew of noted
local filmmakers and television and documentary veterans, looked like the
state’s biggest, boldest, and most professional syndicated offering to date?
According to Miller, it’s all about football.
“Football sucked out the marketplace,” says Miller, currently TEN‘s
lone staffer. “In most markets, including our anchor of WFAA in Dallas, they’d
planned to drop us back at least 45 minutes to accommodate their post-game
shows. And by that time of night, it would be far too difficult to deliver the
type of ratings points to advertisers to make a show of our caliber and cost
financially feasible.”
Although TEN‘s apparent setback has been a popular topic of industry
discussion in a town looking to bulk up its television production output, local
advertising and media pundits say Miller’s football assertion is entirely
plausible as more than “party line” because TEN is a Sunday show with a
suggested post-news 10:30pm start time. “It was well-produced and well-received
here, but we’ve got a commitment to run the Cowboys show,” says WFAA Program
Director David Walther, who says he’s happy with how often TEN won its
time slot in Dallas. “When they come back into production we intend right now
to carry it. And because it’s a good program that we like, we even volunteered
a different time slot for the football season. But it just wasn’t as high
profile.”
Miller says he believes he’ll be able to start again with at least the 10
largest of TEN‘s 15 affiliates, although Austin’s KVUE’s Sunday
afternoon airing is at this point still questionable. As for staffing, Miller
says he’s unfortunately had to “furlough” all of TEN‘s key producers,
writers, and on-air talent, but plans to offer work to the majority of the
regulars upon TEN‘s return. Surprisingly, and contrary to local rumor,
almost all of the show’s staff say they are still considering coming back in
some capacity, including independent producer Jesse Sublett, writer J.B. Bird
and local veteran and TEN cofounder Christy Pipkin, who produced 12
TEN shows and several key segments later in the run. But, faced with the
question of co-anchors Tom McConnell and Buns of Steel infomercial veteran Lisa
Hart’s return, Miller wavers and admits he has bigger problems to consider. “My
job right now is to concentrate on our seven minutes of commercial time so we
can come back on the air, as opposed to solely concentrating on the 22 minutes
of content” says Miller. “I won’t ever do that again.”
Ironically, Miller says, that as word has circulated about the show’s quality
and fast pace, the offers for footage and producers for the 40-60 segments that
comprise that 22 minutes have rapidly increased — even if TEN‘s
dwindling finances forced the show’s later run to recycle entire segments. “The
acquisition side of the operation is incredibly demanding and where this hiatus
hurts is in the news segments themselves, because we’ve got so many people
sending us footage every week,” Miller says, “And it’s going to be tough to
hold stuff until December and look timely. So basically, we’re going to have to
start up again, which isn’t easy.”
As for the advertising that comes packaged with TEN, the show’s
insiders say that although the August addition of a mega-sponsor like the Texas
Lottery may bode well for the future, it may have been too little too late to
avoid the hiatus. And while some of the same TEN insiders say better
long-term commitment from advertisers would have allowed TEN to stay on
through the football season, Miller and the programmers say TEN may have simply
fallen victim to the television advertising paradox that creates a shortage of
statewide sponsors — large advertisers look to buy onto national programming
while local businesses need only local, not statewide, time.
To complicate matters, Miller says the show’s viewer commitment — measured in
part by 100,000+ hits on a website Miller now says is too expensive to maintain
during the break — had become TEN‘s most attractive selling point to
advertisers, and the quick decision to bypass football season has left a
majority of those viewers wondering what’s beyond the September 1 edition.
“Initially, sponsors were impressed by the high ratings,” Miller says. “We were
winning time slots in six months that most nationally syndicated shows took two
years to achieve. But better yet, in the major markets, we had a very
sophisticated audience that was involved in spending disposable money. They
traveled and went to entertainment events.”
So while Miller and the stations admit that whether TEN viewers will
have a Sunday night show to watch at the end of their weekend getaways is still
far from a sure thing, TEN‘s current plans call for a December startup
and mid-January return — perhaps just enough time, says Miller, to regroup and
learn valuable lessons from the first season. “We’ve found it’s very hard to
start a weekly anything, especially something as cost-intensive as television.
The original goal was to create and promote a community through entertainment,
and on that end we were beginning to succeed. And because we really liked what
we were doing, the goal now is to simply find ways to financially make it pay
off as well.” n
This article appears in September 27 • 1996 and September 27 • 1996 (Cover).