PASADENA, Calif. — Last fall, "Commander in Chief" rode into office on a huge popular mandate. Averaging more than 16 million viewers a week, it was the most-watched new show of the season.
More recently, the show's audience has fallen by a third, and the ABC series is beginning to look like a lame duck.
There are a lot of theories about what happened. Some insist it was because a new writing staff made the show more about politics and less about the family of the first woman president (Geena Davis). Others point to the return of ratings juggernaut "American Idol" to Fox's Tuesday lineup.
But the biggest factor was that the show suddenly disappeared for a month and a half. After airing weekly from Sept. 27-Nov. 29, viewers had to wait six weeks for a new episode. And a lot of them didn't wait.
"Obviously we're disappointed in "Commander" ticking down the last few weeks," said ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson. "I think being off for so long . . . has hurt it."
Drama behind the scenes hurt the show. Creator/executive producer Rod Lurie got so far behind on the production schedule that ABC replaced him with TV veteran Stephen Bochco, who had to "hit the ground running" just to get episodes on the air.
Bochco's top priority was to "very quickly . . . generate scripts, because . . . the show had just sort of gotten so far behind schedule in terms of generating material that it sort of becomes a compounding felony" that leads to "real production difficulties."
After pounding out a couple of episodes to get the show through November sweeps, production was shut down for nearly four weeks "so that, as a writing group, we could take a deep breath and have a little time to think and plan and get some new material working so that . . . we could come back into a much more normalized kind of production schedule."
Davis expressed confidence in the new regime. "They came in, and within five days we had one of the best scripts that we'd had. And they just, from the beginning, were knocking it out of the park."
I would argue that the show is better under Bochco. Lurie's episodes quickly devolved into the cartoonlike "good" president vs. the cartoonlike "evil" speaker of the House (Donald Sutherland), and everything was wrapped up with a neat little bow at the end of the hour. In Bochco's episodes, the characters are more realistic, more evolved, and the situations are filled with shades of gray.
Not that Bochco himself has in any way publicly criticized his predecessor, even declining to specify what problems he faced when he took over "because it sort of invites a critique of the show prior to my arrival, and that's not a comfortable analysis for me to engage in publicly. All I would want to say to that is that I think Rod Lurie created a hell of a show, and I think he put in place some wonderful, wonderful, compelling elements."
Politics has dominated the show, but Bochco did bring in Polly Bergen as the president's mother. And an upcoming storyline will focus on the family when the president's teenage son gets a girl pregnant.
But because of production problems, "Chief" will produce only 19 episodes this season. And, after airing on three consecutive Tuesdays (beginning tonight), the show takes a six-week break before returning on April 18 to finish out the season.
Which means that even if "Chief" can rebuild its audience this month, it's going to have to do it again in April.
"Wish we could do something about that, but we just can't," Bochco said. "Obviously it's always difficult when you go down for a while," said Bochco. "It's even difficult with well-established shows. I remember when we used to go down for as much as a month or five weeks on 'NYPD Blue,' we always had a tough time building our audience back up, because people get distracted by other things, understandably."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com