At the start of the 2022 NFL season, much of the early attention about the league’s media partners was split between two stories: ESPN’s new Monday Night Football team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, and the first year of Thursday Night Football exclusivity for Amazon’s Prime Video. By the season’s end, both turned out to be successful for different reasons. The new MNF team gave gravitas back to the NFL’s historically special primetime window. Amazon was able to produce telecasts that were on par with their linear TV competitors while also attracting Gen Z viewers whom the league has coveted for the last decade.
Fast forward nearly a year later and the TV environment the league is surrounded by has dramatically changed. Marching towards September, the public is getting closer to what will feel like an eternal summer – something that sounds good in theory for beach days and vacations but not for television. The concurrent strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have meant that shows slated to debut or return in the fall have halted production until deals with the studios and media companies are reached. The strikes have only reemphasized the importance of live sports, which have had their own history of labor fights that have delayed or outright canceled entire seasons. For better or worse over the years, sports are the string that has held the whole TV ecosystem together because of the exorbitant rights fees that media companies pay to broadcast the games.
Could the broadcast networks regret letting one particular deal escape their grasp in light of these strikes? Chances are that none of them were too keen on retaining Thursday Night Football any longer than the NFL commanded. In the long run, TNF was an expensive property for what is generally the weakest portion of the NFL schedule. Despite still garnering higher linear ratings than everything else on TV, the games are often criticized for their lack of quality compared to the Sunday or Monday slate.
Broadcast networks have been and will feel the crunch for the dearth of scripted fare through at least the start of 2024. (Cable will feel it, too, but with many channels dependent on syndication for large chunks of their programming anyway, the full impact could be delayed.) Several of them have already released fall schedules that feature combinations of unscripted/reality programs, shows that were previously exclusive to their streaming siblings, and a handful of new shows that were already in the can before the labor impasse.
Last September, yours truly considered that not having TNF was a win of sorts for those channels as the primetime hours devoted to the games returned to studios that were producing scripted shows.
Yet, TNF would take away four months’ worth of Thursday primetime hours from scripted and unscripted TV producers, programming hours that a few shows could have used to build an audience on a high-usage day. (After Sunday’s broadcast primetime, Thursday’s broadcast primetime is the second-highest daypart in terms of TV usage.)
Despite the diminished importance of broadcast television for Gen Z, those networks still offer highly-viewed shows for everyone else, including casual followers of sports and non-fans. Essentially, Thursday has been returned to scripted show creators. While those hours may not seem like much within a single week, TNF took up anywhere between 50-60 hours of critical TV inventory (not including pre-game shows) every broadcast season. Sports may be propping up these channels, but plenty of people watch the litany of procedurals they all offer.
Of course, this could be moot if Comcast actually rolls back the 10 p.m. hour on NBC’s primetime schedule, as rumored – never mind the fact that it didn’t work out the first time. And just like films, broadcasters are obsessed with franchising singularly successful shows – NBC is all in on Chicago, CBS loves law enforcement, and FOX keeps dialing 911. Yet, for the millions of Americans who actually don’t want to watch sports, reclaiming those fall primetime hours means more opportunities to discover new shows again. (And for the sleep-deprived, these shows don’t go into OT).
All of this was said while the specter of the strikes seemed distant and probable but not overly concerning. The costs of NFL games are mostly mitigated by the advertising and sponsorship dollars they bring to a network, but even the most expensive scripted shows on the broadcast networks don’t carry the NFL’s price tag. And over the next twelve years, as Amazon retains TNF, those very hours will remain in the hands of the studios, writers, and actors… so we hope.
Yet, Thursday Night Football would have come in handy right about now, at least for 2023. The Thursday primetime schedule for the first four months of every new television season would have been set in stone for FOX, CBS, or NBC as their mainstay dramas could have either been pushed to another day of the week or been held back until January when the regular season was in the books. That time wouldn’t have saved the entire primetime schedule from the strikes – we’re talking about just one night out of seven, though Saturdays tend to be heavy on sports or reruns of weeknight shows anyway. Yet it would have given a built-in buffer for certain shows to get back on track without the need to rush production, should all sides come to their respective agreements in a timely manner. With Thursday night being the most watched primetime window on TV, the channel that had TNF in the fall and early winter would have a slightly easier transition to a heralded drama in January.
There’s an argument that sports will help streamers more than linear networks, one made recently on CNBC by former Netflix and Hulu executive Simon Gallagher, though the assistance comes from documentary programming rather than live games. However, sports are already baked into the infrastructure of linear networks, and the NFL did its TV partners a huge favor by adding a 17th game to its schedule just three years ago.
Eventually, the striking guilds and the media companies will kiss and make up, though it won’t be in time for some channels to salvage most of the 2023-24 broadcast season. The live sports telecasts they have will continue to perform well enough, but the strikes will clearly impact their bottom lines. For the first time and perhaps the only time ever, Thursday Night Football could be in demand for people other than gamblers and fantasy football fans. Unfortunately, that tiny minority – major television executives – could spend this fall and early winter lamenting what could have been.
