http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=256249

Homicide: Life on the Street, Philanthropist producer Barry Levinson blasts
Saturday reruns
By Richard Huff
DAILY NEWS TV EDITOR

Film and TV producer Barry Levinson says the broadcast networks are making a
mistake by not actively programming Saturday nights.

"I've yet to have anybody explain it to me," says Levinson, who co-produced such
series as "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "The Philanthropist." "Saturday
night was a huge night on television."



He quickly reels off the names of such classic hits as "All in the Family,"
"Mary Tyler Moore" and "M*A*S*H," which flourished on Saturday nights years ago.

"Somehow the networks decided to forfeit Saturday nights," he says. "You have a
massive audience, they're available and they can't find anything to watch."



Indeed, in recent years, the broadcast networks have pulled back from offering
original fare on Saturdays to airing reruns of shows from the week before.

The argument has been made that the cost of making new dramas prohibits airing
them Saturdays, when audiences are smaller than on weeknights. Nielsen estimates
there are 101.1 million viewers in prime time on Saturdays, the least of any,
but still a big number.


But going the rerun route is wrong, says Levinson.

"There's a retreat," he says. "I don't think the answer is to retreat. ... When
you give up Saturday night, you open the door for people to go somewhere else.

"Basically, they're shrinking their own audience," he adds.



Levinson says he's got a couple of TV shows in a number of different stages of
development but declined to discuss them.

"It's complicated and very kind of confusing," Levinson says. "There's a lot of
fear in the marketplace."

For now, however, he's focusing on talking up "PoliWood," his documentary on the
collision of celebrities and politics, set to air Monday at 7:30 p.m. And he's
finishing a documentary on Jack Kevorkian.



For "PoliWood," Levinson had access to celebs at both the Republican and
Democratic National Conventions, and the goal was to look at the process, he
says.

"If a celebrity says something, it gets on television, right or wrong, or
whatever," Levinson says. "It just gets on."

He had not been to a political convention before and said that going in he
wasn't sure where the story would take him.

"It's all a circus," he says. " It's a political circus."

The film, though, looks at how celebrities play at getting information out.


"What PoliWood says," he adds, "is sometimes you get more attention for a
particular cause because of the nature of being a celebrity. Some issues that
can't get any traction suddenly come to the forefront because a celebrity's
involved. That's the way it works in the world we live in. Everybody's vying for
space; everybody's pushing for attention."

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