With the 2024/25 annual season starting next week, we take a look ahead at the new season commissions using the announced fall slates of the main four US networks of ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC, comparing new shows to commissioning trends in previous seasons.
Most notably, the total number of shows commissioned by the networks has risen, even equalling the last two annual seasons combined. This isn’t surprising given the pause in production due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes, but its an interesting increase given the 33% increase on two years ago. Whilst the autumn period last year wasn’t very busy in terms of commissions, many new new season shows were last years mid-season shows such as that were reportedly rolled into this fall season through strike related difficulties, although it’s difficult to say how many of those might have been moved anyway. Shows such as “Brilliant Minds” from NBC and “High Potential” from ABC would be moved to this next season to avoid the need to truncate a buzz worthy show’s very first season. Looking at the individual networks it’s clear that CBS and ABC were primarily focussing on existing IP during the strike season as neither of them aired a brand new show until the mid-season. Contrasting that NBC have had a steady churn of new shows across the last three seasons and FOX seem to be increasing the number of new scripted shows on the network. Also of note are what returning shows happen to effect the number of new commissions, for instance the network change for “9-1-1” from FOX to ABC can help explain why ABC has less new commissions than the other networks while FOX has more than the network has in previous years.
Having a look at the types of newly commissioned shows immediately indicates the need across all the networks for more procedural shows, with all but one network commissioning multiple new procedurals for the new season. This could be indicative of a need to fill out their schedules due to the tendency of procedural shows to run longer than their serial counterparts. There also seems to have been a slight shift in the ratio of new comedies to new dramas with a 16% swing towards comedy shows, not to mention no new serial dramas on any of the networks for the next few months.
There has also been a slight change in the original IP that these new shows are based on, the majority are still original concepts and yet the number of show spin-offs or reboots has doubled this year compared to the last two. This has been primarily driven by CBS, who with “Matlock”, “NCIS: Origins and “Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage” have really focussed on their strategy of recreating or expanding on some of their most popular franchises.
With this being just a snapshot of the latest TV season it will be interesting to see if this ends up reflecting the wider market once streamers and other networks are taken into account, but we may well be at the start of an annual season with more new content than ever before and not just down to the newly launched streaming services that has been reason in the past few years.
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