Will Your Favorite Shows Be Canceled?

In the promo that ABC’s been running for the two-hour Grey’s Anatomy season finale this week, a tearful Chandra Wilson (as Dr. Miranda Bailey) tells colleagues in an anguished voice, “We’re all scared!”

She could be talking to almost everyone who works in television these days.

This week brings a lot of season finales and some may turn into series finales. Among shows that are “on the bubble,” in network parlance, are Chuck and My Name Is Earl on NBC, The Unit on CBS. and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and Bones on Fox.

It’s a little demoralizing that an industry that purports to be guided primarily by creative considerations came up with Howie Do It. And apparently, those high-minded days are ending.

Dollhouse has already had its season finale, which hit a series low in ratings, so it would have been in the crosshairs even in sunnier times. But other shows that perform moderately well are caught up in a complicated calculus in which financial considerations are playing a bigger role than ever.

With ad revenue declining and audiences fragmenting, networks are groping for a way to survive. “I’ve never seen a time when money and budget were so important to creative decisions,” says a top agent, adding that one network, despite having a “lukewarm” reaction to a pilot, said it might greenlight the show anyway if the budget could be trimmed to make it cheaper. And this agent says money is driving decisions to an unprecedented degree about everything from which programs get on the fall schedule to the number of writers on staff to casting even relatively minor roles.

It’s a little demoralizing that an industry that purports to be guided primarily by creative considerations came up with Howie Do It. And apparently, those high-minded days are ending.

Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, says a colleague remarked to him recently that it seemed as though the old order of things has been reversed from the days when decisions were based 80 percent on the best programming strategy and 20 percent on financial considerations. Graboff claims NBC is still setting its schedule based on the programming—and in fairness, the network recently increased the budget for the low-rated but acclaimed 30 Rock—but if there’s a close call, Graboff acknowledges, cost could tip the scale. (Though no decision has been reached yet, think Medium versus the less expensive Chuck.)

The head of one television-production studio says the networks are milking the upheavals in the industry for all they’re worth. “As far as the networks are concerned, the more mileage they can get out of this economic downturn, the better,” he says. “They’re going to try to balance their books wherever they can.”

There’s plenty of evidence of that at every network, whether it’s NBC driving Heroes to slash more than 20 percent of its budget, or CBS leaning on the leading stars of the CSI shows and other dramas to forgo pay increases contemplated in their contracts or risk the loss of lesser cast members or writers or both.

For the most part, only the biggest shows are getting a pass. A writer for one of television’s few hit sitcoms says working for the series has been “like an opulent trip back to 1994, when the shows bought us meals every day and gave out nice gifts at the start of production.”

But most shows—even reasonably successful ones—are under pressure. At NBC’s presentation to advertisers last week, Graboff said Law & Order: SVU will be back but not necessarily with series stars Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay. Those two pull down about $350,000 each per episode.

Neal Baer, executive producer of the series, isn’t involved in negotiations for star salaries but he says he understands the pressure to keep costs down. “NBC has been amazingly supportive of us through all these years,” he says. “We try to do whatever we can to make things work with them. If it means we fly fewer guest stars in or we don’t go into Manhattan [to film] as much, we’re willing to help.” The show has also lost one of nine writers. (The networks in general have homed in on writing staffs as a place to trim costs.)

As for Meloni and Hargitay—wager that they’ll be back. In this economy, walking away from an $8 million paycheck just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Kim Masters is the host of The Business, public radio's weekly show about the business of show business. She is also the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else.