TV Shuffle.

NETWORKS RE-JIGGER SCHEDULES TO COPE WITH ABC HIT

TALK about your chess games. ABC's monster hit "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" has created a range of programming strategies by the other three networks in a high-stakes bid to stem the tide of lost viewers.

That all this is taking place during the all-important sweeps period only adds to the pressure to do something.

Long-range, one answer is for the other networks to create game shows of their own - and indeed, Fox spent only a few weeks quickly getting on the air its game show, "Greed." But that's only one night to compete against "Millionaire," which has been airing most every night this month and is creating the kind of national hoopla rarely seen in recent years on network TV.

Meanwhile, NBC and CBS have their own game shows in development, but nothing ready for air. They're left to do battle with their existing lineups.

"It's all happening because a fraction of a rating point means so much more today than it did five or 10 years ago," said Bishop Cheen, an analyst at First Union Capital Markets. "It's no longer a gorilla (NBC) and two also-rans (CBS and ABC). ABC just found a new life."

On Thursday, Nov. 11, "Millionaire" rocked the industry by knocking off NBC's vaunted comedy lineup of "Frasier" and "Friends" - the first time that an ABC series beat NBC on Thursday night since 1983.

Faced with such success, NBC, which has long dominated the sweeps periods and the race for 18- to 49-year-olds, quickly scrambled its schedule to meet the threat.

"We looked at the performance of the first telecast and projected out the sweeps," said Preston Beckman, NBC executive vice president of program planning and scheduling. "We felt it would be a competitive sweeps, and we looked anywhere in the time periods where we could improve our performance."

NBC's first move was pulling its struggling sitcom, "Jesse," from the lineup for the rest of November, replacing it with reruns of "Friends." It also dumped its Monday prime-time comedy lineup, "Suddenly Susan" and "Veronica's Closet," putting in "The World's Most Amazing Videos" to compete with the ABC game show.

The latter move was a disaster. "Millionaire" drew its largest audience ever that Monday, 26.8 million viewers, just below the kind of numbers that "ER" gets.

NBC also decided to scrap its Saturday lineup of dramas, "The Profiler" and "The Pretender," replacing them on Nov. 20 with the 1995 James Bond thriller, "Goldeneye."

"NBC has to keep its big guns trained on `Millionaire' to combat the strength of this thing," said Bill Celia, executive vice president of broadcast and programming at McCann Erickson Worldwide.

But the battle to blunt "Millionaire" isn't going to be easy. The game show placed five of its broadcasts in the top 10 shows for the week ended Nov. 14. The other two shows were in the top 20.

NBC still leads ABC and CBS in total viewership for the new season. NBC has a 14.08 rating in the season-to-date averages, compared with a 13.14 for CBS and a 12.08 for ABC. But "Millionaire" clearly has closed the gap.

For the week ended Nov. 14, ABC was the No. 1 network in households, with a 15.9 rating compared to NBC's 13.2 and CBS's 12.9. By midweek, ABC, responding to NBC's moves, added three more nights of "Millionaire" during the final week of the November sweeps.

"ABC projected out the ratings and realized we would be in a virtual dead heat," said Beckman of NBC. "I think they added more episodes to ensure a win for them. We are not going to respond and dismanfle the rest of our schedule. It's going to be, `I see you and raise you, too.' If we tie them or lose by a tenth of a point, we still had a strong sweeps."

Unlike NBC, CBS has made few moves to counter the threat from "Millionaire." "We've gone with 97 percent of our schedule," a CBS spokesman said. "Our mantra is, stability ultimately wins."

Fox's first installment of "Greed" aired Thursday, Nov. 4, three days before "Millionaire" returned to the ABC schedule. "We wanted to get a foothold a few days ahead of it," said Mike Darnell, Fox's executive vice president of alternative and special programming. "We knew it was coming back and it would be strong. We wanted viewers to sample our show."

Fox launched "Greed" in a special two-hour block from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. The quiz show returned Nov. 11 at 9 p.m., replacing two troubled sitcoms, "Action" and "Family Guy."

The second half-hour of "Greed" went head to head against ABC's game show and was pummeled. "Millionaire" drew a 15.5 rating, compared to a 4.3 rating for "Greed."

Darnell said he slotted "Greed" at 9 p.m. Thursdays to give the show at least one half-hour where it wasn't directly competing against "Millionaire," which starts at 8:30.

"We get slaughtered in the first half-hour," he said, "but we're hoping that viewers will come over to us, which they are doing." Darnell said Fox is currently deciding the future of "Greed."

If NBC and Fox are playing poker with their schedules, so is ABC. "Millionaire" comes in half-hour and one-hour versions, and is shrewdly moved around the weekly schedule to solve problems.

On Tuesday nights, a half-hour version is slotted in between "Spin City" and "Dharma & Greg." One recent Monday night, a one-hour version was used as a lead-in to Monday Night Football.

Andrea Wong, ABC vice president for alternative series and specials, said NBC could do little else but make changes in face of the success of "Millionaire."

"For them, it is defensive," she said. "They have to try and maintain their schedules in face of this phenomenon. They've moved the weak shows and are trying to put their best foot forward in competition with us."

The future of "Millionaire" is being debated now within the ranks of ABC. The biggest issue is whether to bring it back as a regular series once the November sweeps conclude or bring it back as an "event" for the February and May sweeps.

Media buyers anticipate that ABC's affiliates, who have suffered from the network's declines over the past several seasons, are clamoring for its return, especially because it boosts the ratings of local newscasts.

ABC also is looking at keeping the show on seven nights a week, as well as bringing it back for three nights a week. Wong said a decision would be made within the next several weeks.

McCann Erickson's Cella said right now, "Millionaire" pretty much has the game show field to itself, but he expects that will change when NBC and CBS, which are both developing big-money game shows, get around to launching them.