Tribune spices up HBO's 'Sex'
WB domestic distrib to sell skein beyond co.'s markets
The parties declined to discuss dollar figures, but analysts said the show could end up grossing more than $100 million -- a solid figure, but well below the $1 billion-plus that a broadcast hit such as "Seinfeld" or "The Cosby Show" can rack up.
Hardest to predict are the advertising revenues "Sex" will draw: HBO will hold back three 30-second spots within each half-hour run on the Tribune stations as part of a four-year license term that begins in September 2005.
HBO has hired sister company Warner Bros. Domestic TV Distribution to start selling "Sex" to TV stations beyond the 26 Tribune markets, which reach 35% of the U.S.
With 65% of the country still to be heard from, it's too early to get a fix on how well "Sex" will perform in syndication from the cash license fees and the advertising spots.
HBO also is talking to sister network TBS about a simultaneous cable play for the reruns of "Sex" during the four-year syndie window. But TBS could find itself competing with Chi's Tribune-owned WGN, which doubles as a satellite-delivered superstation, reaching 55 million subscribers beyond the Chicago area.
The reason no other cable series has generated the syndication response of "Sex and the City" is that "cable has finally reached critical mass," said Garnett Losak, VP and director of programming for Petry Media.
Cable inroads
"The advent of strong scripted series on cable," Losak said, "is a fairly recent phenomenon. But now we're beginning to see shows like 'South Park,' 'The Shield' and 'Strong Medicine' coming into the syndication marketplace," as well as the possibility that HBO will decide to syndicate "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under" and other hit series at some point in the future.
Other cable skeins finding their way into off-net syndication include Sony's "Ripley's Believe It or Not," which was successfully split into half-hour episodes and stripped.
The Tribune sale ends the long search to find a home for the off-net run of a cleaned-up "Sex" strip. HBO earlier this year approached the major broadcast webs about acquiring "Sex" repeats for their primetime skeds.
The cabler asked for a license fee of around $3 million an episode, given the higher CPMs broadcast nets command in primetime. All four nets eventually passed, however.
Before that, HBO tried to sell edited segs of "Sex" in 2001 to a wide variety of basic cablers at $750,000 a pop, but it later scrapped those plans.
"We had to face two questions before we bought the show," said Marc Schacher, programming veep for Tribune Broadcasting. "First, the matter of content. We looked at a sample of edited episodes and became convinced that HBO had succeeded in making the show appropriate for broadcast. Second, with all the editing, was it still a funny show? The answer was yes."
Although most Tribune stations are planning to strip "Sex" in latenight time periods, Schacher said there's no corporate mandate on the subject. "We depend on the local Tribune station to tell us what's appropriate in its market," he said.
Twice the 'Sex'?
Scott Carlin, prexy of domestic TV distribution for HBO, said TV stations could run "Sex" more than once a day, the way many stations do with "Seinfeld" reruns now, for example.
But HBO has produced only 94 half-hours of "Sex" (there are more than 150 "Seinfeld" episodes), so stations likely would hesitate before potentially eroding the value of "Sex" through too many runs.
One big selling point for HBO was that only about a third of U.S. households receive HBO, so to most viewers the show will be fresh. "Sex" also is guaranteed to pull in lots of young viewers, whom advertisers will pay a premium to reach.
