The 10 O'Clock News

By Richard Zoglin

Hollywood is busy right now, as the networks scramble to put together their fall schedules and wrestle with such weighty problems as which show will get Seinfeld's time slot and how quickly they can clone Ally McBeal. This spring, however, the most intriguing moves are being contemplated at the network news divisions. The result could be a big step on the road to a long dreamed of, but never realized, goal: a network newscast in the lucrative, heavily viewed hours of prime time.

ABC News executives are mulling a radical overhaul of their two successful magazine shows, merging PrimeTime Live and 20/20 into one program (most likely called 20/20) and expanding it to four or even five nights next season. The revised show may also include at least a few minutes of the day's news at the top of the hour. "It's one of the most important decisions ABC has confronted in recent years," says News president David Westin, "or will confront for some time to come."

At NBC, meanwhile, Dateline, the uncannily successful magazine show anchored by Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips, keeps spreading like kudzu into new prime-time real estate. The program began in 1992 and is now seen four times a week. Next fall it will probably expand to five, and West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer acknowledges that his ultimate goal is a full slate of Dateline, seven nights a week.

Even at CBS, where prime-time news has had a bumpier road (48 Hours, now in its 11th season, is still plugging along, but Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel has fizzled in the ratings), programmers are toying with an alluring but risky idea: expanding the venerated 60 Minutes to a second night. The chief stumbling block is the people behind 60 Minutes, who fear diluting the show. "We think it's a terrible idea," says executive producer Don Hewitt. "[Network programmers] hope to persuade us. But they haven't yet."

Enjoy life while you can, NYPD Blue and Chicago Hope. Your likes may not be long for this world. All three networks seem to be moving inexorably toward a prime-time news hour nearly every night of the week (usually at 10 p.m., 9 p.m. in the middle of the country), which could combine an evening-news-style wrap-up of the day's events with the kind of feature segments and investigative pieces that currently fill the magazine shows. Such a program could even--somewhere down the road, when the Rathers and Brokaws and Jenningses have passed from the scene--replace the traditional evening newscast altogether.

The network news chiefs insist nothing so drastic is being contemplated just yet. Though pummeled by competition from cable, local news and the Internet, the evening-news programs still have an important function. They are the flagship broadcasts for the network news divisions, they showcase well-paid and highly respected news stars, and they still make money. Though their ratings have dropped steadily, the decline has been less steep than the slippage in network viewership overall. In the latest Nielsen ratings, ABC's World News Tonight (ranking second behind NBC's Nightly News) was watched by 7.5% of the nation's TV households. An average hour of ABC's prime-time schedule was seen by just 6.8%. "A significant number of Americans are watching [the nightly news]," says NBC News president Andrew Lack, "and millions would be disappointed if it weren't there." Says CBS News president Andrew Heyward: "I see prime-time news as a supplement to the evening-news program, not a substitute."

Still, few people these days are home in time to catch the network evening news. These viewers are now being served by cable channels like MSNBC (with Brian Williams' 9 p.m. newscast) and CNN (which is about to introduce a four-night-a-week magazine show, airing at 10 p.m., in conjunction with Time Inc. magazines). Local stations in many markets have done well with newscasts opposite the last hour of network prime-time fare. In Europe and Canada, national TV newscasts have run in prime time for years.

Shortly after becoming ABC News president in 1977, Roone Arledge proposed that the network's struggling evening newscast be switched to 10:30. (The idea didn't fly, and Arledge created Nightline instead.) Former NBC News president Lawrence Grossman recalls that in 1990, after leaving NBC, he suggested to CBS chairman Laurence Tisch that the network should move its evening news to 10 o'clock, where it would get a bigger audience. (Tisch listened, but nothing came of it.) "There has to be some change in the structure we now have," says former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter, "where three evening-news shows are Xerox copies of one another in a dwindling market. Someone will see a chance to break out first and make a big score."

To understand the current boom in prime-time news, it helps to go back to a notorious truck fire in November 1992. That was when Dateline NBC aired a segment in which an explosion was rigged to show the alleged safety problems in some General Motors trucks. It was an embarrassing black eye for the new program, but it prompted NBC to bring in a fresh executive producer, Neal Shapiro, who put the show on a winning road. Dateline spun stories off the day's news more often than its rivals (particularly on high-impact tabloid stories like O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey); had a looser, more viewer-friendly format, with regular features like Pauley's Timeline quizzes; and kept filling weak spots in NBC's schedule. This season three of Dateline's four weekly hours have often ranked among the Nielsen Top 20, and the show is reaching the youngest audience of any network newsmagazine.

Though Dateline has done some hard-hitting investigative reporting, it can stray as close to local TV news as anything the networks have yet come up with. Among its stories last Monday, for instance, was a reprise of the day's juiciest car chase on the California freeways. But Dateline has led the network magazine show closer to the news of the day. "The rule used to be that when there was a big, breaking news story," says Shapiro, "if you didn't see it on the evening news, the next place to catch it was your local news, and then maybe Nightline. We said, 'No. If it's a great story, we'll have it that night.'"

Another important lesson that Dateline has imparted is that a single brand name can be an efficient way of building a franchise. At ABC, Westin thinks consolidating PrimeTime Live and 20/20 would end some of the internal battles over big stories and interviews, and give the network more flexibility. One idea, he says, is to divide the show between hard-news stories in the first half and back-of-the-book features in the second. Anchors could be mixed and matched from night to night. But making such a change (a decision will come before May 19, when ABC announces its fall schedule) is fraught with difficulties. Would merging the newsier PrimeTime Live with the softer, consumer-oriented 20/20 destroy the distinctiveness of each? Which of the shows' executive producers--20/20's Victor Neufeld or PrimeTime's Phyllis McGrady--would be in charge? (Insiders doubt the two could work well together.) And how would the star anchors--Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs of 20/20, Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson of PrimeTime--be parceled out? Walters and Sawyer have reportedly balked at the plan. But Sawyer told TIME she would welcome the move if it kept the distinctiveness of the two shows. "No one wants to lose the thing you love most," she says. "But if we can get to do more because we're not duplicating effort, then it's hard to argue with."

The danger for all three networks, of course, is that the rush toward more news hours could lead to a glut, driving viewers away to entertainment fare on other networks or cable. Some news executives, moreover, are worried that expansion is diluting the product. "If history is any guide, people will get tired of newsmagazines," says Arledge, the longtime president (now chairman) of ABC News, who reportedly plans to step aside from day-to-day management in June. "The good ones will survive, and the bad ones won't. We have to be careful we don't compromise quality just to get more hours on the air." Hewitt points out that newsmagazines have multiplied not because viewers want them but because the networks can't find new entertainment hits. "If NBC found five more Seinfelds, there would be two or three fewer Datelines on the air," he says. "That's not news. That's filler." A 10 o'clock newscast, though, might fill a need.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK