NBC executives said the network was stealing a page from the cable television playbook when it green-lighted its upcoming anthology series Fear Itself and chose to launch the horror series during the summer.
From the makers of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, Fear Itself will consist of one-hour tales of terror and feature such stars as John Billingsley and Shiri Appleby. Among the directors already confirmed are Brad Anderson, Mary Harron, Ernest Dickerson, Ronny Yu, John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon.
“What we did with Fear Itself was we saw an audience for scripted programming watching cable, and we weren’t giving them any original scripted programming in the summer,” Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said in response to a SCI FI Wire question during the network’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on April 2. “So, really, the decision was ‘Hey, horror films work all summer. Why don’t we go after that world and experiment with it during the summer? And let’s go after scripted programming.’”
Silverman also cited a second practical business reason for NBC to move forward with Fear Itself and to air it on Thursday nights, beginning May 29. “[There was] the fact that the motion-picture studios were the biggest buyers of our Thursday-night real estate,” Silverman said. “What better venue to advertise your horror film [opening] on Friday than Fear Itself on Thursday night? So that was very calculated and conscious by genre and by time period and by when we put it on seasonally.”
(NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) –Ian Spelling
