Programming – ‘the act of choosing and scheduling programs on a broadcast TV station, subscription channel, or online service’

Eastman, S. T. & Ferguson, D. A. (2006)

It is the way in which broadcasters select and filter shows to the general public, their audience. Usually implemented in a way that can attract the largest possible audience, they want to draw in all demographics. It’s the very conscious choice to play early morning children’s cartoons before school starts at 9am and when it ends at 3pm. It is the decision to have one popular game show followed by a pilot for a new series, in hopes of attaining some of that audience. It is everything to do with which ads play when, what content is restricted at which times, and how many hours of infomercials they can get away with. Since the dawn of Television, programming and scheduling have been rooted in the foundations of what has become modern watching. It is a process that has shaped the way we plan out our days, and it is the reason why we can no longer see a world where the news doesn’t come to us in three regular parts every day of the week.

The daily morning news, the midday report, the nightly news; these three programs have plagued almost every commercial free-to-air station in Australia. We have grown dependent on coming home from a long day at work, turning the telly on and settling down to hear updates from in and around Melbourne at 6pm. Sometimes during dinner, sometimes just before bed, but almost always between the hours of 5pm-6pm, the evening news has been embedded into our culture. These hours have been perceived as the optimum time-slot to engage with most viewers from the majority of adult demographics, especially since they rake in over a million views most nights.

However, the 2009 debut of the 7PM Project rocked the status quo on when to receive our news and gave us more insight into how we should ingest the content. The show in a nutshell is the the in-between child of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight and your regular current affair show, with regular panelists and guest appearing to give their opinions and commentary on the daily news topics. It delivers news, “but not as you know it“, and frankly no one else knew as well what to do with it. Starting off as a drastic challenge to at least compete in the 7:00pm time-slot for Network TEN it didn’t fare well in its first few weeks. Like all new ambitious TV shows, 7PM was still trying to find its feet and figure out exactly what it wanted to become. This itself was shaped by its scheduling, with children still awake to censor hard comedy, and adults too weary to listen about more serious topics being downplayed by trivial news.

It took some time for the format to grow and mature into the well developed show it is today, but the interesting thing concerning the show was it’s fluidity in scheduling, and how it shifted from airing at 7PM shifted to first a 6:30 time-slot and eventually the 6PM broadcast we have now, with no drastic repercussions. Not many shows go through as many changes as The Project did, especially in the short time of 3 months, but it reflects how the fundamentals of scheduling have dictated that we watch this type of content at this  specific frame. The final shift solidified the show as news related, with it flowing on from other free-to-air channels airing news and current affair shows at a similar time. The show itself couldn’t stand on its own to go against the grin for long, and the fact that it succumbed to TV ‘norms’ shows that some Television programming conventions need to stay in place for the show to truly flourish.

 

Eastman, S. T. & Ferguson, D. A. (2006). Media Programming: Strategies and Practices

Knox, David (2009). ‘The 7PM Project’, tvtonight.com.au, article can be found here