Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 7, 1995 TAG: 9508070093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID ZURAWIK THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The series, TV's highest-rated sitcom, suggests both the synergy that makes this an obvious media marriage, and one of the main paths the Disney-owned ABC television network is expected to travel.
As ABC Entertainment president Ted Harbert puts it, ``ABC's comedy shows, like `Home Improvement,' are made for America's families.''
Says Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, ``Disney has always been about family entertainment.''
The key word is family. ``Home Improvement'' is a family sitcom - with little or no subject matter that parents find objectionable for their children. It's the kind of fare that has become the brand identity for both the ABC television network, with franchises like its ``ABC Family Movie,'' and Disney, in everything from theme parks to the Disney cable channel.
It's no coincidence that Disney's Burbank, Calif.-based production company makes and owns ``Home Improvement'' and that ABC is the network that rents the rights from Disney to air the hit series.
For those rental rights, ABC pays Disney Productions more than $1 million per episode for each of 22 first-run episodes a year. Such multimillion-dollar arrangements made the two companies partners long before last week's mega-deal.
Now the $22 million will go from one pocket to the other, the result of Disney becoming a model of vertical integration - the economist's way of saying a company has it all, from production to distribution to marketing.
Disney makes ``Home Improvement'' and ABC distributes it to an audience of 30 million viewers a week. After that, Disney can air reruns in syndication on the nine local television stations it acquired with Capital Cities/ABC Inc. (11 stations by the end of the year when the sale of two more are finalized). Then, Disney can air reruns on cable - on the Disney Channel, which it owns outright, or on Lifetime, which it now owns a piece of (along with ESPN) thanks to the Capital Cities acquisition.
And then there are the foreign channels Disney now owns a portion of, as well as the foreign markets hungry for top American programming, which Disney can feed via satellite. Furthermore, all of this can be promoted on the network, the local television stations, local radio stations, the cable channels, the newspapers, magazines and in the theme parks Disney owns.
``Home Improvement'' star Tim Allen is going to give new meaning to the term ``poster boy'' thanks to the incredible reach of the new Disney media conglomerate - now the largest entertainment company in the world.
No wonder Eisner said: ``Think of all the things we can do together. I am totally optimistic that one and one will add up to four here.''
Eisner is a hands-on manager who once worked at ABC as vice president of prime-time production and development. His taste is going to determine, to a large extent, what viewers see on ABC in coming years.
The programs Eisner played a key role in developing at ABC were ``Laverne & Shirley,'' ``Welcome Back, Kotter'' and ``The Bionic Woman,'' according to media critic Les Brown. Eisner is said to like family sitcoms, such as ``Home Improvement,'' most of all.
But it would be a big mistake to think family fare is the only direction ABC will go under Eisner, or that the network will show only Disney productions. In fact, says University of Maryland media analyst Douglas Gomery, it was Eisner's decision to start making adult-themed films when he took over as head of the Walt Disney empire in 1984. That decision took Disney Films from corporate drain to industry leader.
Films made in the 1980s under Disney's Touchstone banner included such relatively mild fare as ``Down and Out in Beverly Hills'' and ``Stakeout.'' But, in recent years, Eisner has taken Disney into a harder terrain of sex and violence with such feature films as Quentin Tarantino's ``Pulp Fiction,'' distributed by Disney-owned Miramax.
Eisner's bottom-line orientation also will guarantee that ABC's prime-time schedule contains shows he thinks will get the biggest audiences, not just the shows produced by Disney.
by CNB