Veteran Exec Preston Beckman Weighs In On Importance Of TV Schedulers: “They Are Always The Smartest People In The Room” – Guest Column

deadline.com:

Editors note: On October 10, Deadline posted a story summarizing a Medium column written by Jim McKairnes, a former SVP Planning for CBS who’s spent the past 13 years teaching TV history at the college level.

The title of his piece was “Scheduling a TV Memoriam: An RIP Of Sorts for a Once-In-Demand Television Industry,” which, among other things, said that scheduling “is the word that’s slowly becoming irrelevant to the medium, having less and less meaning as television itself comes to mean more and more.” Both the column and our subsequent writeup struck a chord with current and former executives, many of whom were eager to defend today’s linear schedulers — even though pretty much everyone acknowledged how much the job has changed over the years.

So we asked former Fox and NBC executive Preston Beckman, who worked for 35 years in audience research, strategic program planning and scheduling before stepping aside in 2015, to share his thoughts on whether it’s really appropriate to schedule a TV memoriam for schedulers. *** Tuesday night my wife and I were enjoying one last dinner with our son before flying back to La La from NYC when suddenly the “Bat Signal” went off on my phone.

Several people I know who are still in the biz asked if I had seen a Deadline article that summarized a piece written by a broadcast executive-turned-academic entitled “Scheduling a TV Memoriam: An RIP Of Sorts for a Once-In-Demand Television Industry.” He posits the death of scheduling.