TV Shocker: Broadcast is Growing Again — and the Numbers Prove It

Here’s the good news heading into this week’s upfront presentations in New York: Broadcast television is growing again.

With the bulk of the renewals, cancellations and new series orders having been completed, the total volume of scripted originals across the Big 4 broadcast networks this year sits at 56 — up a smidge from last year’s tally of 49 at ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. (The CW, since its Nexstar takeover, no longer develops originals in-house.)

This year’s total volume is nowhere near the whopping 92 scripted comedies and dramas the four networks collectively programmed in 2019 — before Covid upended development and everything else in Hollywood — or even 2021’s early post-pandemic count of 79.

But even if the days of 100-plus pilot orders are never coming back, networks have shown an increasing willingness to return to the traditional development model — in a more fiscally responsible fashion. New series orders are up one from last year with others likely to come as the Big 4 continue to make pickups outside of the traditional January-May cycle.

And for all the talk of how challenging it is to deliver a successful comedy, the number of half-hour comedies on the schedule (including animated) is up by seven year-over-year as drama series numbers hold steady.

“Broadcast is a juggernaut,” NBCUniversal president of program planning strategy Jeff Bader tells me. The executive, with more than three decades of experience in the industry, recently examined the number of programs from the current TV season — scripted, unscripted, sports, specials, etc. — that notched more than 1 million viewers in their first 24 hours without streaming and found that more than 12,300 broadcast programs topped that metric. 

Streaming content, meanwhile, topped out at fewer than 600 programs getting 1 million viewers in a single day. Removing sports from the equation, Bader said the top streaming show was the Dec. 31 series finale of Stranger Things, which collected more than 9.5 million total viewers in its first 24 hours on Netflix. “In my ranking, Stranger Things is at 180, behind the NBC Nightly News [broadcast on] Feb. 7,” Bader says.  

Today I look at what the Big 4 are offering up this coming season (and some of the next) — and I crunch all the numbers from 2019, 2021, 2025 and 2026 to get a scope on the broader trends of how ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are faring.

You’ll learn:

• Which networks continue to invest in new scripted originals
• How much each network owns of its schedule
• Where the year-over-year growth is — and isn’t
• The major programming trends at each network
• What the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery could mean for CBS’ slate
• How NBC’s experiment with returning to pilots panned out
• Burning questions about how the uptick in originals can continue