Miniseries Stray From Their Roots
In a TV landscape dotted with serialized dramas, crime procedurals and reality programming, the poor, forgotten miniseries is deader than the sitcom.
But the genre, which brought us such seminal TV events as "Roots," "The Thorn Birds" and "The Stand," pops its head out of the grave once in a while, usually in far more modest form.
For instance, USA Network is dabbling with the miniseries form with a romantic comedy called "The Starter Wife," starring former "Will & Grace" star Debra Messing as a Hollywood wife thrust into turmoil when her husband leaves her for a Britney Spears-type girlfriend. The six-hour series debuts at 9 tonight.
"The biggest television event of the summer," USA Network has hyped in TV ads. But Marc Berman, a TV analyst for Mediaweek.com, said "big events" are hard to come by when there are hundreds of channels to choose from, compared with the days when it was only ABC, NBC and CBS.
"It's very difficult in this fractionalized marketplace for viewers to commit to watch several hours in one week, which is why you don't see it anymore," Berman said.
In fact, USA is spreading the six hours of "The Starter Wife" over five weeks.
This past season, the major networks mostly ignored the miniseries, even during the so-called sweeps months, which help local advertisers set rates. "Miniseries don't exist anymore" on the big networks, Berman said. "They hardly even do made-for-TV movies anymore."
The heyday of the genre was the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when networks would regularly haul out the big budgets and the big stars (Richard Chamberlain! Robert Duvall!).
"It was a dominant form of television," said Ron Simon, curator for the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City. "It brought broadcast networks prestige as the era of three networks came to a close. At the time, cable couldn't afford to do it."
However, as broadcast networks saw their audiences dwindle across the board, the miniseries lost their financial allure, especially if viewers didn't glom on early.
Nowadays for the big networks, "the miniseries is disruptive to audience flow" in relation to regular series, said Brad Adgate, director of research at media planning firm Horizon Media. "Just think about Fox and the problems postseason baseball causes for them in the fall."
Berman said the last time he can recall a broadcast network trying a huge miniseries was NBC in 2003 with the drug-trafficking drama "Kingpin." It ran six hours over three weeks, and, he said, it bombed.
There is some debate over the definition of the term "miniseries." But it's generally acknowledged as a midway point between a film and a regular series, typically running two to eight episodes, frequently on consecutive days or over a relatively short period of time. Many are period pieces, often based on a novel.
"The Starter Wife" is based on a best-selling fictional book by Gigi Levangie Grazer; it's set in modern day, and its aspirations are not exactly the level of a "Shogun" or "Elizabeth I."
"We're looking to give TV viewers the equivalent of an escapist beach read," said Laurette Hayden, senior vice president for long-form programming for USA.
For Messing, taking on this role was a way to go deeper into a character while not having to make a long-term commitment as she did with "Will & Grace."
"I think you would sacrifice a lot if it was a two-hour movie," Messing said in a recent press conference. "As an actress, it was a thrill and luxury to be able to do what you're supposed to do in a six-hour project and not to rush things."
And since a miniseries lacks the potential return on investment of a regular series, even networks with the scheduling flexibility and budget of USA Network will do only maybe one a year.
In the case of USA's sci-fi miniseries "The 4400" in 2004, the drama was such a success, it became a regular show. Its new season will start June 17.
SciFi Network uses miniseries as a way to test the feasibility of a concept for a regular series. The remake of "Battlestar Galactica" started as a miniseries in 2003 and turned into a critically acclaimed series.
The close-ended nature of a miniseries still has appeal, said Simon, the TV museum curator. But in many ways, he noted, viewers have another outlet to see a cast of characters interact over a brief period with a definitive ending to bring closure. It's called reality TV. And it's much, much cheaper.
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