Alas, Showtime canceled Odyssey this week, despite our being their highest-rated original series! Apparently the powers that be want to get out of doing SF (they picked up Jeremiah, as I understand it, because it's part of a long-standing deal with MGM).

By John Dempsey and Melissa Grego

NEW YORK (Variety) - Showtime plans to ramp up the number of series it commissions, forging into new areas like reality and animation while slashing the number of original movies annually to 14 from 23.

The money Showtime saves by doing fewer movies will be more than offset by the push toward more series: The pay-TV network's programming budget will soar above $425 million in calendar 2003, a jump of more than 5% over that of last year.

Sony Pictures TV, producer of the two existing series on the bubble the past few weeks, "Street Time" and "Odyssey 5," got a renewal for "Street Time," starring Rob Morrow (news) and Scott Cohen (news). Sony and Showtime are negotiating over the exact number of new episodes.

Things are not looking as good for "Odyssey 5," which probably won't make it to a second season because Showtime is reconfiguring its Friday lineup to make room for only one sci-fi series, MGM TV's "Jeremiah," which the network has renewed, with Sean Astin (news) added to the cast.

Showtime president of production Jerry Offsay said he's ready to greenlight production of six pilots that could go to series in the next year:

= "The Game," from Spike Lee (news)'s 40 Acres & a Mule company, deals starkly with the tension among San Francisco street gangs led by whites, blacks, Latinos and Chinese.

= "Huff" skewers upper-class, suburban life by focusing on a psychiatrist facing a midlife crisis.

= "Lifestyles" concerns a couple who relocate from Silicon Valley to "wild, eccentric" Orange County, where they run a microchip company.

= "Clive Barker (news)'s Lord of Illusions," a sci-fi horror series, is loosely based on the theatrical movie about a private investigator whose expertise is the supernatural. This pilot is tentative because the budget could be prohibitive.

= "Paradise," a sprawling "Dallas"-like soap opera is set in the world of wealthy televangelists (Offsay mentions Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell as models).

= "Going to College," from documentary veteran R.O. Cutler, is a mix of documentary footage and scripted dialogue that follows a group of real-life freshmen at the University of Texas at Austin.

Showtime will continue to schedule at least one original series in primetime each night, but its series-expansion plans will stretch into latenight on the weekends.

The first of the latenight shows is "Penn & Teller: Bull," a half-hour magazine series that premieres next month. Magicians Penn & Teller will expose what they consider fraud in all areas of American life, from TV hosts who claim they talk to the dead to scientists who believe in alien abduction. Showtime has committed to 13 episodes of the show.

Showtime's second latenight show is "Family Business," which follows, "Osbournes"-style, a young man who just happens to produce and direct porno films with a company that's run by his mother, with his cousin doing the distribution. The commitment to "Family Business" is 10 half-hours, for premiere in the spring.

Two other latenight entries are the Jamie Foxx (news)-hosted "Laffapalooza" (10 half-hour comedy shows scheduled for spring), featuring at least two comics a week doing standup, and "My First Time," 26 reality half-hours in which women, interviewed on camera, will describe their first sexual experience. The women will then watch as actors re-create the steamy scene.

Showtime has decided to pull back on the number of original movies because foreign sources of production money have begun to dry up, Offsay said.

Until the past year or two, Showtime had to put up only about a third of the production budget of a typical movie because the supplier could harvest the rest of the cost from media companies in Canada, Europe and other international territories.

With the decline of these international dollars, Showtime's percentage has jumped to more than half of the budget of these movies, just as the cost of the pictures is rising precipitously. Offsay said a high-end movie for Showtime that cost $4 million two years ago now can't be made for less than $6 million.

But Offsay also said Showtime's marketing and sales departments had a hard time engineering the promotional support for such a huge volume of unknown movies. "By scheduling fewer movies," he said, "I'm giving the staff more time to promote each of them."

The cost of series episodes is rising just as fast as that of TV movies, Offsay said. The series range now is $1.25 million-$1.6 million per episode compared to $1 million-$1.4 million two years ago.

Previously announced Showtime series new to the schedule next year include "Dead Like Me," starring Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin (news), and "Out of Order," starring Eric Stoltz (news) and Felicity Huffman.

Originally posted by das Monkey

There are still 6 filmed episodes that haven't aired.

Originally posted by ten41
Episodes 15 and 16 don't appear on the site anymore. I hope they still plan on playing them.