This week's TV: Can Attachments be saved?

William Gallagher gets attached to a new series

By the BBC's William Gallagher

UK television producers dream of having long runs as in the US.

But the price of being commissioned for 26 episodes instead of six is that you spend your days praying you will be allowed to get to the end of the first batch.

For many, most US series do not even get close.

The new American season is about three weeks old and already the first casualty has been announced - a sitcom called Danny is not going to make it to a whole month.

Competition is so fierce on US TV that networks will routinely cancel a series and just throw away episodes that have yet to be screened

There will be many, many more failures before the month is out. In January there will have been so many that a whole new raft of programmes will be launched as what are called mid-season replacements.

Insecure

If you have a long-running hit like ER you are probably safe but if you are brand new you are most certainly not secure, not in the slightest.

Competition is so fierce on US TV that networks will routinely cancel a series and just throw away episodes that have yet to be screened.

It is unlikely that any UK broadcaster could ever do that, but we are both coming close to it and also dangerously ignoring it, by ordering up a whole second series of programmes before a single episode of the first has aired.

We follow the US, not by discarding episodes altogether but by moving them out of harm's way.

This week, ITV1 is bumping its Ross Kemp drama Without Motive from prime time 2100 BST to the little more out of the way slot of 2220 BST (Thursday 25 October), for example, and last week it did the same thing to the final episode of Bob and Rose.

The cast of dotcom drama Attachments are back for a second run

But this week also sees the start of a second season of Attachments (also Thursday, 2200 BST, BBC Two) and this run was reportedly ordered before the first aired and unfortunately flopped.

Interestingly, though, it appears that maybe this was not a case of two series being commissioned but instead one long one that was to be split in two.

That sounds like a daft distinction to make, chiefly because it is.

But if it is true then it you can presume that some of the costs for developing the whole long run were spent up front and that therefore it needs the full order of episodes for each one to work out cost-effectively.

The accounting term for it is amortisation and it has been always been used in TV.

Easy payments

Even when Doctor Who was being planned in the early 1960s the cost of the Tardis police box was too much for one episode but became manageable in a kind of hire purchase scheme of easy payments over the run.

One newspaper report last year claimed that something like this had been done with Hearts and Bones, a series whose ratings were so low that it was a genuine surprise that it got a second run.

Yet that was one case where this worked. That second run was a much greater success.

Now Attachments has been re-tooled too, with blatant production changes and subtler story amendments.

The big difference is that where the first run of Attachments was 10 episodes of 50 minutes each, this new one is 16 episodes of 30 minutes each.

Attachments feels it has to do more intimate tales

We will never know whether BBC Two requested the change or the makers, World Productions did.

Yet whoever instigated it, the whole shape of the show's story has been changed by it and it feels it can no longer do broad tales, it has to do intimate ones.

And this could be what saves the show as arguably it was difficult to become concerned by the characters in the first run.

It would be nice to be able to say that the show has cracked it and will now become a long running hit, but while it is extremely well made, so was the first run.

The makers cannot rest easy, then, but at least in the UK you can be sure the show will see out its run, no matter at what time of night it ends up