Image Credit: Mario Perez/ABC
Nobody ever thought that CSI would become a huge hit. Certainly, when the show debuted on a Friday night in 1999, no one imagined that the show would inspire two spin-offs and a bottomless well of syndication cash. CSI was the first TV show from movie guru Jerry Bruckheimer and was the brainchild of newcomer Anthony Zuiker; its most familiar face was William Petersen, at the time a journeyman actor a decade away from his days as a big-screen leading man; and the whole concept of CSI seemed like a hard sell, taking the focus away from the detectives onto the science nerds dusting for fingerprints. But in television, a big risk can reap big rewards.
This Fall, we here at EW have put on our Consultant caps and done a risk-assessment on every new TV show hitting the broadcast networks. The result is our Fall TV Risk Factor, the most quasi-scientific and all-around number-crunchiest guide to the new TV season you’re likely to read this week. But just for fun, we decided to cast our net back through recent TV history and take a look at how some other shows would have performed according to our model. Lost and Glee were both huge risks when they debuted: One was an expensive serialized fantasy with no clear antecedent besides maybe X-Files; the other was a musical TV show at a time when the most recent musical TV show was Viva Laughlin.
Just for fun, we’ve also thrown in a few shows that wound up being less successful: Fox’s big-budget time-traveling drama Terra Nova, Aaron Sorkin’s starry behind-the-scenes dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, which was a show that actually happened. enjoy!
Lost
The Pitch: 5
The Stars: 5
The Team: 4
The Time: 2
Ken’s Risk Rating: 1
Risk Factor: 17/25
Glee
The Pitch: 5
The Stars: 5
The Team: 3
The Time: 4
Ken’s Risk Rating: 1
Risk Factor: 18/25
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
The Pitch: 3
The Stars: 1
The Team: 2
The Time: 2
Ken’s Risk Rating: 2
Risk Factor: 10/25
Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior
The Pitch: 1
The Stars: 2
The Team: 2
The Time: 1
Ken’s Risk Rating: 1
Risk Factor: 7/25
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
The Pitch: 4
The Stars: 4
The Team: 4
The Time: 3
Ken’s Risk Rating: 1
Risk Factor: 16/25
Also:
The Risk Factor: Rating this fall’s new TV shows
Follow Darren on Twitter: @DarrenFranich
