Fox’s Glee has all the right ingredients: high school + music, the hopeful underdog story of outcasts banding together to pursue their dreams against the odds, and a perfect promo vehicle in American Idol. But will the glee over Glee be enough to keep viewers captivated until this fall?
The show has already generated plenty of positive buzz among critics, media buyers, and eagerly awaiting viewers … and Fox has created even more buzz with their unusual “split-season” programming strategy – premiering the pilot episode next week after Idol even though the rest of the episodes will air in the fall.
But timing is everything. The show is perfectly positioned to fill Idol viewers’ void over the summer and gives us a funny, hopeful, positive story-line just when we need it most. So why is Fox waiting? Apparently a decently performing Lie to Me, Fringe, and Bones mean there is no room in the current schedule – but more interestingly, the decision to wait (but not really wait) reveals the increasingly outdated economics of the good ol’ broadcast season model – traditionally higher ratings/CPMs in the fall mean more expensive (in this case $3 million per ep) shows go there … while the summer is reserved for things like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. But is this really necessary any longer? Hasn’t cable shown us that people will show up for good TV over the summer?
To keep fans interested, Fox plans to promote on Hulu, to give away DVD copies of the pilot, to continue promoting the series via So You Think You Can Dance, to premiere a new version of the pilot in the fall, and to keep viewers engaged online via Photobucket uploads of “gold star” moments. Whether all of that will be enough to keep people interested (or just make them feel overly manipulated), we’ll see …
Still, no matter how well it does this fall, I’ll wonder if it could’ve done just as well (if not better … and without the extra months of promotion) this summer. After tonight’s Idol, I for one, could use a show about high school kids singing Journey RIGHT NOW.
Mental Orange: Tang for Your Head. 