TV networks have given up trying to find the next This Is Us or Modern Family

Vulture

"So what did we learn from this week’s announcements?" Josef Adalian says of this week's upfronts. "Well, sadly, I can’t say there’s any reason to suspect we are in for a season of creative inspiration and bold attempts to reinvent the network paradigm. To the contrary, there seems to have been a collective decision that what network viewers want is more of the same — literally. There will be more versions of Law & Order, NCIS, America’s Got Talent, and FBI. There will be new iterations of CSI, The Wonder Years, Wheel of Fortune, Gordon Ramsay cooking competitions, and singing shows where people hide their true identities. There will be a whole lot less of networks even pretending to veer outside their established lanes. And there will be almost no experimentation with formats missing from prime-time TV but flourishing in streaming, like unscripted docuseries and specials. Instead, we’ll get another year of networks in survival mode, giving the audiences they still have more of what they think they want. Short-term, this is probably a smart strategy, since it limits viewer erosion. But it will do nothing to grow the network audience, and yeah, I actually don’t think growth should be ruled out. Streaming is the future, but networks all have streaming platforms, too. Nielsen even measures some of those platforms. There’s a big audience for what we think of as 'network' shows — easy-to-watch comfort food that doesn’t need to be gobbled over a weekend; series with relatable characters instead of troubled antiheroes; comedies which are actually funny. But instead of trying to find the next generation of such programming — the next This is Us, the new Modern Family — broadcasters seem to have decided they can’t risk taking the chances necessary to find those new hits. I hope they get their courage back."