Fans are often asking us about future season sets of their favorite TV shows, and the truth is that the studios share very little - or often nothing at all - with us in the way of reasons about why a show like, say,
Diff'rent Strokes gets a "Season 1" release and then is never heard from again. We're not alone among journalists in that regard; studios rarely share that sort of information with the press or the consumers who may be left hanging while waiting for more. So Susanne Ault of
Video Business trade magazine - a sister publication of
Variety - decided to do a little digging on her own. With the studios such as Paramount not offering any comments, she went around and talked to many of the honchos at various retail chains. And she talked to TVShowsOnDVD.com owner Gord Lacey as well for his insight.
In her October 14th story (
"Delay For Some TV DVD Season Set: When season-one discs underperform"; registration required), Ault begins by commenting about how several shows are stuck with DVDs in the early years of their broadcast run, while many many others have gotten into their 5th or 6th seasons (indeed, I might add that a decent number of long- running popular shows are already complete on DVD). What is the hold up on certain shows? "High costs and low sales seem to be the culprit in most such cases, as music clearances on TV titles can get prohibitively pricey with no guarantees of big sales," the story explains. "To get around high costs, studios commonly have subbed in cheaper TV soundtracks for subsequent-season sets, but that practice has drawn some consumer ire. So retailers suggest studios consider other cost-shaving practices, such as packaging two seasons in one for some of the dormant titles."
Music clearances
were said to be an issue preventing the
Malcolm In The Middle - Season 2 release from Fox, but
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was slowed down for years due to poor sales on the first season release. In regard to the latter, Ault's story quotes Fox senior Vice President Steve Feldstein as saying that, "We went out there ahead of everyone else with classic TV, (a)nd it took awhile for people in the industry to catch up." But when he was asked about
Malcom, he only noted, "We’re constantly evaluating everything in our library." Oops, that doesn't sound very promising. As fans ourselves, we join our readers in hoping that Fox finds a way to make it happen, as they did with
Mary.
One set of titles which received frequent mention throughout the article are Paramount's
Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and
Mork & Mindy. As we pointed out, Paramount did not talk to
Video Business on this matter. But Tower Records told Ault that they sold less than 500 units of each set of
Days and
L&S, and another mid-sized chain was mentioned as having an initial buy of 900 units each on those but had first-week sales of just 10% when they were anticipating around 30-40%. An executive at the latter (unnamed) retailer was quoted as saying "If it doesn’t sell off 30% to 40% in the first week, you know it’s not going to happen".
Different chains had different ideas about how to overcome the sales problems on
Happy Days and
Laverne & Shirley. A manager at Tower was portrayed in the story as saying that the studio should "cram as many [episodes] as possible on as few DVDs as they can" (at TVShowsonDVD, we call that "the Sony method"). A buyer at Fred Meyer, on the other hand, thinks the solution is to "combo packaging of separate but related TV shows" such as these two shows, perhaps as "best ofs" rather than the more popular TV-DVD release style of season sets. A buyer at Newbury Comics (a New England-region chain that sells way more than comic books) thinks that the lower-interest titles should at least be scheduled for around Christmastime, where the increased foot traffic would give them more exposure.
What doesn't get addressed in the
VB story is that these two shows are, like
Malcolm In The Middle, victims of high music clearance costs. I was told by a source who will remain anonymous that Paramount's margin on those first season releases were rather thin, thanks to the high cost of the original music, and they were counting on good sales to make it happen at a profit (which no business can survive without!) when these titles hit the stores in 2004. They continued to monitor the sales through the 2004 Holiday season, hoping that there would be renewed interest at that time. When that didn't materialize, things took a turn for the worse in regards to the DVD future of those shows. The studio is left with many options, all of them sounding very bad for fans of the shows: release them at very high price points, release them with replaced music, release best-of sets only, or don't release them at all.
Our own Gord Lacey was quoted in the article, and there he "said some consumers hold off buying first-season TV DVD sets until further sets are announced. 'If season one doesn’t sell, the studio won’t release season two, but the problem with fans is that they’ll say they won’t buy something until a studio seems committed.' " Gord continues: "It can upset consumers, because they view it as, ‘You release season one, so you owe us to release the rest of it...It’s a fact that TV shows bring people all these feelings and emotions. (Consumers) aren’t thinking of it as a business but just something to enjoy." Virgin Entertainment Group buyer Chris Anstey seemed to be of the same mind. Anstey was quoted as saying, "What amazes me is that no matter how obscure or generic a TV show might be, there’s always someone who’ll buy it. As long as the studios recognize this, they can manufacture modest quantities and generate respectable sales."
The story also brings up a particular series about a dead girl wrapped in plastic, noting that "At Amazon.com, the most requested title these days is a second-season set of
Twin Peaks". The aforementioned buyer at Newbury Comics, Ian Leshin, is said in the story to be crossing his fingers for this item as well. And, as with their other titles mentioned in Ault's great write-up, Paramount (who has DVD rights to the property now that the pre-existing license to another studio has expired) would not comment. But we've been
telling our readers for a while that the 2nd Season really IS on the way, and we've spoken with people involved in the production. Originally it was hoped that we would have it in our hands by now, but
delays until 2006 were necessary in order to ensure that fans would be happy with the video and sound quality. In fact, the latest update on
Twin Peaks - which was so minor a mention we decided it didn't warrant a separate news post - was at the David Lynch fan site
Dugpa.com on Sept. 26th. Lynch was at a lecture and responded to a fan question by stating that "he'd been planning on doing the 5.1 mix of the Twin Peaks Season Two DVD in his home studio, but then things stalled and he never got the go-ahead. He's still waiting for the go-ahead." That "stall" is very likely having to do with the delay to 2006 we already mentioned. We're going to keep a close eye on that item ourselves, so stay tuned. Our thanks to Susanne Ault of
Video Business for such an insightful story...we encourage our readers who can to register there and read it in its entirety!
