<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>One of the reasons I still harbor a lingering TNT hatred is not that they dropped Crusade. It is that they kept hanging on to the rights so that no one else could possibly buy it.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Yes and no.
Immediately after the second production shutdown, when Sci-Fi first attempted to pick up the show, TNT was asking a high price. They wanted Warner Bros. to refund every cent that they had contributed to the production cost in licensing fees - even though they were killing the show after 13 episodes and were contractually obligated to pay Warner Bros. for 22. (TNT never did pay for the balance of the unproduced shows.)
That was a budgetary problem for Sci-Fi, but it wasn't the deal killer. They backed off and said, in effect, "Fine. You air the existing 13 first, it's the only way you'll make your money back. Then we'll talk to Warner Bros. when the rights revert back to them." Because as soon as TNT aired the show once as a "limited series" and took it off the air, the rights
didrevert to Warner Bros.
The real problem was the
B5 reruns. The Sci-Fi Channel was not willing to pickup an untested new show like
Crusade without also being able to air the "parent show." No other network would have taken
Crusade without
B5 either. And TNT knew it. Unfortunately, TNT had exclusive rights to the
B5 reruns until February 2001. The price they asked for those rights was outrageous, something no network programmer in his or her right mind would ever pay. And that's what really killed the deal.
(I used to know someone who worked for a company in Los Angeles that was involved in this deal - I don't want to say how, because I don't want to identify the company or the individual. Suffice it to say that this is someone I had corresponded with for a long time, and who I knew was in a position to know about stuff like this. Much similar information about other deals had come from this source in the past and had checked out. This person described TNT's proposal for the
B5 reurns as "a ransom note.")
Sci-Fi had really
already allocated its funds for new series for that production year - but they still tried to make the numbers work and came very close to doing it. Until they saw TNT's price for
B5. TNT used the
B5 reruns as a club with which to kill
Crusade and make sure it stayed dead. That is the
only reason they kept
B5 on the air as long as they did.
B5's ratings had been slipping as they got into the third and fourth rerun cycles, which is way they started moving the show to other timeslots and replacing it with stuff that got better ratings. After the
Crusade mess even hardcore fans stopped tuning in. In other circumstances, TNT would probably have simply dropped the show from their schedule.
But if they did that, they would lose their exclusive. The rights would revert back to Warner Bros. which would then be free to sell
B5 - and
Crusade - to anybody who wanted them. So TNT finally reduced the show to once a week on Saturday mornings, but they refused to cancel it.
That's why well-intentioned efforts like Jerry Doyle's to get some kind of new
B5 project off the ground never got anywhere, and why JMS wasn't actively pursuing anything himself. He was biding his time. He knew that nobody was going to do anything new in the
B5 universe without having rights to the original show. And that wasn't going to happen until TNT's exclusive ran out. So why bother doing anything in the meantime. He waited.
Warner Bros. didn't. They calculated - correctly - that at a certain point it would no longer be worth TNT's while to hang on to the show. In February of 2000 they started top-secret negotiations with The Sci-Fi Channel about
B5. Even JMS didn't know about them at the first. When they had reached an agreement, they went to TNT.
(They also told JMS what was up. By an odd coincidence my L.A. friend got wind of this at the same time. He contacted me to find out if
I'd heard anything - which was pretty funny since I live in Florida and was running a computer network for a mortgage company at the time - in other words, I was about as far as you can get from Hollywood and still be in the U.S. I heard from one or two other people trying to verify the rumor that talks were underway, and for once we got everybody to agree to keep quiet about this for fear of screwing up the deal.)
At that point TNT had less than a year to run on their
B5 contract. WB and Sci-Fi had agreed on terms for the reruns. TNT could have palyed hardball and kept the show until 2001. The problem was that Sci-Fi could afford to wait them out. They wanted to launch
B5 in the fall of 2000. But they had no problem waiting until March 2001 if TNT's asking price was too high. TNT could either take a little for the show now, or absolutely nothing for it when Sci-Fi picked it up by default when the exclusive expired. TNT took the money.
In March 2000 Warner Bros. and the Sci-Fi Channel formally announced that SFC would be the new home of
Babylon 5 come September. Bonnie Hammer finally had the show that she had been trying to acquire since 1998.
As a last spoil-sport gesture, TNT then worked out that they could run the entire series one more time if they showed it six days a week and doubled up on a couple of the Saturdays. That's exactly what they did, airing the show at 6 AM M-Sat and promoting it enough to ensure that lots of folks at least taped the show every day, which they figured would cut into Sci-Fi's ratings. (It seems probable that Sci-Fi decided - at the last minute - to ask Warner Bros. for the widescreen version of
B5 in order to counter this move.)
TNT also made sure they ran all the TV movies again.
TNT aired "Objects at Rest" and "Sleeping in Light" on a Saturday in September. The following Monday
B5 made its debut on The Sci-Fi Channel.
So now you know the
real depths of TNT's perfidy.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
