The Dumpster Fire That Won't Go Out

Just the other day I had a post on the revival of the former A&E Live PD show, now on a new channel, Reelz, as On Patrol: Live. Just a day later, it was an item on regular news:

A&E filed a lawsuit seeking to block rival network Reelz from airing “On Patrol: Live,” which it claims is a blatant ripoff of its own show, “Live PD.”

Both shows feature live footage from police ride-alongs, both are hosted by Dan Abrams, and both are produced by the same company.

A&E canceled “Live PD” — one of its top-rated shows — in June 2020, at the height of protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Reelz debuted its version of the show last month. In the lawsuit, A&E argues that “On Patrol: Live” copies nearly every aspect of its own show’s format, down to specific catchphrases. The Reelz show even occupies “Live PD’s” old time slot.

My wife and I resumed watching whatever you want to call the show as soon as we heard about it. The accounts are completely correct, the show is a full revival of Live PD down to the look and feel of the studio, just under a different name. There's no question that the show's audience, which was the biggest on weekend cable and among the biggest at any time, felt its cancellation at the peak of the cancel culture during the BLM riots of 2020 had been a grave error and was grateful for its return.

REELZ reeled in 3.5 million unique viewers for “On Patrol: Live,” with an average viewing time of 146 minutes across the seven telecasts over the premiere weekend starting July 22. The show made REELZ the second most watched network among all ad-supported broadcast and cable networks during its live showings on Friday and Saturday night, propelling REELZ into a top 25 cable network position for the first time ever. In Live+3 data, Friday’s episode grew 27% in HHs, from 623,000 to 792,000, and Saturday’s rose 22%, from 684,000 to 835,000.

In contrast,

A&E lost a ton of its “live” (plus same day) viewership after cancelling “Live P.D.” last year amid a firestorm over onscreen depictions of policing following the killing of George Floyd. Immediately after the network canceled “Live P.D.,” the cable channel’s primetime viewership declined 49% — or pretty much by half. That’s no surprise since at the time of its cancellation, “Live P.D.” was A&E’s highest-rated program and occupied multiple evenings on the schedule. Since then, things have been a bit better — but barely. For the recently ended second quarter of 2021, A&E was down 42% in total viewers from the same time in 2020, averaging 495,000 overall primetime audience members compared to 852,000 the year before. Those numbers, like all in this story, are according to Nielsen’s Live + Same Day data, which we chose due to the dominant live viewership delivered by live show “Live P.D.” But the loss of that block of reality programming has delivered a big hit. The month before “Live PD” was canceled, May 2020, A&E ranked as the No. 8 ad-supported cable channel in total viewers. The month after cancellation, A&E sunk all the way to 20th.

The show's host and de facto spokesman, Dan Abrams, had telegraphed throughout the summer of 2020 that efforts of some sort were under way to bring the show back at A&E, but they never came to fruition. At the time, A&E said in a blandly corporatese announcement,

"This is a critical time in our nation's history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD," A&E said in a statement. "Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And with that, we will be meeting with community and civil rights leaders as well as police departments."

Wikipedia describes Dan Abrams as

an American media entrepreneur, television host, legal commentator, and author. He is currently the host of the prime-time show Dan Abrams Live on NewsNation, On Patrol: Live on Reelz and The Dan Abrams Show: Where Politics Meets The Law on SiriusXM's P.O.T.U.S. channel. He is also the Chief Legal Analyst of ABC News.

In other words, the man is a media heavyweight. I've had a mild interest in his career over the years, and as far as I've been able to tell, his opinions on social and political issues are fully consistent with every other media heavyweight at his level. In other words, he really isn't that much of a pro-cop sort of guy. On the other hand, Live PD or OP: Live, whichever you want to call it, is a gold mine, and Abrams is not opposed in principle to making a buck.

This brings up the actual conflict at the lizard-people level. With the 2020 COVID-and-BLM dumpster fire gradually receding in the rear view mirror, people who actually want to make money out of quality entertainment saw a chance to bring back Live PD, which had been canceled, apparently with no serious intention of ever reviving it, by A&E. Even in 2020, media analysts were questioning A&E's judgment, and two years later, A&E hasn't won back the nearly 50% of its audience it lost.

On one hand, the immediate popularity of the revival -- and its ability to return without renewed demands for its cancellation -- seem to have caught A&E flat-footed, with Reelz's sudden rise to prominence an additional embarrassment. At some point, someone is going to have to hold the suits at A&E responsible for, first, the original call of canceling the show, and then for doubling down on the original bad call.

However, the financial penalty to A&E is still probably just secondary to the main issue, that A&E seems to see itself as a cultural leader and thus with the authority to decide who gets to see what, on its own network or for that matter anywhere else. On one hand, they made a lot of money from a show the deplorables loved. On the other hand, once it became clear that the right people didn't want the deplorables watching it, A&E got with the program, and as far as they're concerned, the program is still the program. Money has nothing to do with it.

I think this is the actual conflict. Dan Abrams is on the side of the money. My guess is he's going to win. Dumpster fires are fun, but they eventually get old, especially when they cost money.