Is ABC Really the Most Mismanaged Major TV Network Today

[Mr. Television]

I watch Castle, No Ordinary Family, The Middle and Modern Family on ABC. ABC needs a big hit bad but they are nowhere as bad a shape as NBC. The only shows on that network I watch are Chuck and SVU. CBS is the best network and it's no real contest.

[TMC]

I would like to believe that a major problem with ABC these days is with Anne Sweeney, who's the President of the Disney-ABC Television Group. Basically, one could argue that she really doesn't understand creation of prime time programming or the unique relationship with affiliate stations. Meanwhile, in her world, cable and satellite MSO's are called "affilia...tes". That relationship when you get right down to it, is dramatically different and less synergistic than that between a broadcast network and an affiliated station.

This article in a nutshell, overviews ABC's performance under Disney during the first ten years:

Who runs ABC at any given moment has been an ongoing trivia question for the past ten years or so. Since 1995—when Disney merged with Capital Cities/ABC in a $19 billion deal—the top job at the network has been like the post of manager of the New York Yankees in the 1980s, when George Steinbrenner fitfully hired and fired skippers almost annually, only to finish the decade without a World Series ring. As executives have come and gone, the product on the air has been inconsistent and ultimately unwatched by an American public that in the age of cable no longer has to give network television the benefit of the doubt.

At every turn during this period, it seems, ABC called for the wrong play at the wrong moment. There was the attempt to make the network into a clone of NBC, which was then achieving ratings bonanzas with Friends and Seinfeld—hip young stars sitting in apartments furnished by Ikea. There was the brief success and then the overuse of a game show—Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?—that seemed to run every night, over and over and over again, to the point where we didn't care whether or not someone won the $1 million prize or how many damn lifelines were left. And then there were the unseized moments, any one of which might have helped make ABC the broadcast juggernaut it seemed destined to be when it first gained access to the resources and power of mighty Disney: the network turned down Survivor (now a perennially top-ranked show for CBS) not once but three times; it balked at Scrubs (now a hit comedy on NBC) and CSI (now a hit franchise, with two spinoffs, on CBS), both of which, gallingly, were developed by Touchstone, Disney's in-house television production unit; and when Survivor's creator, Mark Burnett, came to ABC with The Apprentice, the network's inability to move quickly enough allowed that show, which became a huge hit last year, to land at NBC. Last season ABC finished a distant fourth in the ratings, behind NBC, CBS, and even Fox, and it is reportedly losing $250 million a year. In May, during ABC's presentation at the New York "Upfronts," where networks preview their fall schedules for advertisers, Jimmy Kimmel, the man plucked to be ABC's late-night funnyman (after ABC infamously failed to land David Letterman in 2002), characterized his own network as "the fat kids who eat paste."

[Pavan]

A 2004 article? It will be 2011 in 4 days. And not sure if you know, but Sweeney was named the top female in entertainment (out of top 100) once again by the Hollywood Reporter. I have never seen anyone talk negative about her except you. You're really beating the bush to find negative material. Going back to 2004 to find articles (before Grey's, Desperate, LOST, Dancing with the Stars). This thread is now done (it has been done since early November).