Saturday night TV options growing

“The White Queen,” 9 p.m. Saturdays, Starz

For years, Saturday has been known as the dusty attic of TV options, a mix of warmed-over repeats, cheesy films and reality options such as “Cops” and “Pit Boss.” The primary fresh programming that tends to perform well that day has been sports.

But in recent weeks, three cable networks each introduced original scripted dramas into the supposed Saturday death zone.

Hallmark Channel last month debuted its first scripted series, “Cedar Cove,” a gentle drama starring Andie MacDowell as a small-town municipal judge. AMC moved the third season of “Hell on Wheels,” a stark Western period drama, to Saturday nights earlier this month. And Starz a week later entered Saturday for the first time with a 10-episode limited British series set in the 1400s, “The White Queen.”

“We’ve run original movies on Saturdays since we started 12 years ago, so this is a natural next step,” said Michelle Vicary, executive vice president for programming for the Hallmark Channel and sister station the Hallmark Movie Channel. “It’s been very compatible with our moviegoing audience.”

Decades ago, when there were just three broadcast networks, every night was considered a good night for TV. In 1973, CBS aired the following classics on Saturday night in order: “All in the Family,” “M.A.S.H.,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Even in the 1980s, guilty pleasure TV shows such as “The Love Boat,” “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Golden Girls” were anchors on Saturdays.

Starting in the 1990s, networks began losing ground to cable and started filling Saturday nights with repeats and lesser fare. "They didn't have 22 hours of strong programming a week," said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "So they put their weakest stuff on nights with the fewest viewers. Then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. People stopped looking for good TV on Saturdays."

And despite gains on broadcast TV, cable networks for years lacked budgets to produce quality original programming on enough nights to worry about Saturday.

Now with original programming multiplying every other night of the week on ever more cable channels, executives at some networks are looking at Saturdays with fresh eyes.

For the past decade, AMC had been running Western films on Saturdays, so the network felt moving an existing Western series like “Hell on Wheels” to that night would enhance, not hurt, its viewership. The drama returned on Saturday, Aug. 10, to comparable ratings to when it aired on Sunday nights last year.

Vicary of Hallmark said series are riskier and more expensive than one-off films. But with the success of “Cedar Cove,” which she said is “trending” toward a second season, Hallmark has three more series in development, including one from the producer of “Touched by an Angel.”

Thanks to the DVR, which is in 47 percent of homes, many viewers don’t care when a show airs anymore. Aaron Williams, a 40-year-old Lawrenceville project manager, is a loyal “Hell on Wheels” fan but always watches it after it originally airs. For him, it doesn’t matter so much that it’s on Saturday nights, when he’s rarely watching TV.

But for those Saturday viewers who don’t own a DVR or turn to on-demand options or Netflix, time slots still matter.