Fringe

Movies like “Avatar” have been huge hits, but on the small screen, the genre’s not doing that well

There are a couple of things worth looking out for when it comes to U.S. TV ratings this week. Last week two shows did pretty well in “death” slots that were widely expected to endanger them, and if they can keep it up this week, and for a little while longer, it might mean that the networks have stumbled on a new-ish scheduling technique.

This was announced unofficially a while ago, but it’s now more or less official (and therefore okay for me to mention a second time on this blog) that Fox won’t be bringing back “Remote-Free TV,” their experiment with letting Fringe and Dollhouse do longer episodes and selling fewer commercials at higher prices. Maybe neither of those shows were, in retrospect, the best vehicles for this experment: Fringe has quite a bit of padding and may actually work better when cut back to 41 minutes, and Dollhouse has figured out how to make decent use of the extra time, it’s not successful enough to pull in the big advertising money.

Fox’s experiment with “remote-free TV” — a fancy DVR-era name for returning to the old practice of having longer episodes and fewer commercials — didn’t turn out too badly, but it didn’t turn out well enough for them to continue with it. They won’t be repeating it with other shows, and when Fringe returns for another season (and if Dollhouse does) it will probably be back to shorter running times and longer commercial breaks.