TV shows get second-season chances
Everwood, Night Court among renewed releases
By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 10/3/2008
OCT. 3 | Once without hope for extended lives on DVD, TV shows Everwood, Night Court and Knot’s Landing are being granted second-season releases by Warner Home Video.
When the first seasons of these shows debuted on disc years ago—in September, 2004; February, 2005; and March, 2006, respectively—the product sold below Warner’s expectations.
But fan demand for subsequent seasons on DVD never subsided, studio executives acknowledge.
Due to falling DVD production costs and lower revenue expectation for TV DVD product, Warner is now offering the shows another chance, and second-season DVD sets of Everwood, Night Court and Knot’s Landing are all due sometime in 2009.
Today’s thinner DVD packaging designs especially helped resurrect teen drama Everwood.
“We continue to make improvements in packaging and manufacturing, and that has helped reduce our costs,” said Rosemary Markson, Warner VP of TV marketing. “Since we first released Everwood, we have found slimmer packaging and that has made [production] more efficient. It had been fairly expensive at the time of its first-season release.”
Consumers’ increasing willingness to accept music replacement also helped the second season get a greenlight, Markson said.
Warner also has relaxed its minimum sales goals for catalog TV seasons since 2005, making sitcom Night Court once again look like a viable candidate for retail distribution.
“In hindsight, its sales weren’t really bad,” said Markson. “It was one of the earlier shows we released on DVD. And now we are looking at how it has performed up against classic shows. The bar isn’t as high as if it was a primetime show.”
The soap Knot’s Landing benefited from the rising popularity of Desperate Housewives star Nicollette Sheridan. She joined Knot’s Landing during its second season.
“The consumer response has always been that they believed it wasn’t until season two that Knot’s Landing really picked up,” said Markson. “Sheridan is back with Desperate Housewives, so we wanted to try to give Knot’s Landing a chance with season two.”
In a possible marketing boost for these second seasons, Web site WB.com just launched as a new home to the studio’s past TV shows. A sister of Warner’s DVD division under TimeWarner, WB.com is now streaming Everwood, among other series.
“In general, it’s a fair assessment that these series’ first seasons had not performed at the levels we expected,” said Markson. “In these cases, we continued to receive a lot of requests for them, and there were letter writing campaigns. Obviously, there is the hope that they buy the first season. But these did seem to have interest with the public.”