BET's 'The Game' has final huddle Wednesday

Tia Mowry and Pooch Hall, who left after Season 5, will reunite on the series finale of "The Game" on Wednesday.
Tia Mowry and Pooch Hall, who left after Season 5, will reunite on the series finale of "The Game" on Wednesday.

Where were you when you heard about the 7.7?

Ask anyone involved with BET's comedy The Game, and they will recall every glorious detail.

That's because the number refers to the 7.7 million viewers who tuned in for the fourth-season premiere after the show switched networks from The CW to BET in 2011 -- an enormous number that made it the most-watched sitcom premiere in cable TV history. Jaws dropped throughout the TV industry. Tyler Perry sent flowers.

Ratings would never reach that number again, but it was still a huge victory for The Game, an occasionally overlooked series about professional football players and their loved ones. The show ultimately ran for nine seasons and 147 episodes, an impressive run that contributed to ending the drought of black TV comedies at the time.

Now, Wednesday's forthcoming series finale marks a bittersweet moment for everyone involved with the groundbreaking show, which made Washington-headquartered BET network a player in the scripted TV programming world. The series, featuring bold, brash characters and entwining story lines that balanced comedy and drama, helped pave the way for current broadcast hits such as Empire and black-ish, executives say. Then there was the 7.7 million, confirmation that an audience would show up.

"It felt," says BET president and chief executive Debra Lee, as she remembered getting the news of the show's giant debut, "like winning the Super Bowl."

In 2006, executive producer and creator Mara Brock Akil was deep into her UPN comedy Girlfriends when she had an idea for a show. She pitched the concept to UPN president Dawn Ostroff: a series centered on the wives, girlfriends and mothers of professional athletes. As a cost-effective bonus, she could incorporate it into an episode of Girlfriends. (This is known as a backdoor pilot.) Ostroff agreed and Akil was thrilled.

"We were having such great success with Girlfriends," Akil says. "But it wasn't always easy getting a show about people of color on, especially back then."

Called The Game, the series debuted in October 2006 as one of the first programs on the new CW network, a merger of UPN and the WB. Starring Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall and Wendy Raquel Robinson, the show began as a young woman named Melanie (Mowry) postponed starting medical school at Johns Hopkins to follow her boyfriend, Derwin (Hall), as he began his pro football career with the fictional San Diego Sabers. Soon, Melanie's world was populated with others, including Tasha (Robinson), the mother of the Sabers' quarterback; and Kelly (Brittany Daniel), wife of the team's wide receiver, as they went through the ups and downs of life in the spotlight.

The show lasted three seasons before CW decided to take the fledgling channel in a different direction, meaning more hour-long dramedies such as Gossip Girl. It was a blow to the cast and crew, particularly because the series had found its groove. Fans were furious in early 2009 when the network canceled The Game and Chris Rock's autobiographical Everybody Hates Chris -- with a few notable exceptions, there had been a lack of sitcoms with black leads since the 1980s.

It wasn't long until BET took action. The network, looking to make a splash with original, scripted programming, was already showing reruns of The Game. Executive producer Kenny Smith says he believes the repeats made the show's original episodes tick up in the ratings, as viewers slowly got hooked when BET showed marathons. "It was binge-watching before we had the term binge-watching," Smith says.

Knowing there was an audience, Lee entered into negotiations to pick up the show. During the lag time, devoted fans rallied on social media, proving that there were eager viewers waiting. Lee says this was a motivating factor in bringing the show to her network. Nearly two years later, the move paid off in a big way, as The Game debuted in January 2011 to its historic number.

"We didn't put a lot into marketing," Lee says, crediting the huge fan base on Facebook for spreading the word. "We spent what we had, [but that] wasn't enough to get 7.7 million viewers on its own."

The Game eventually settled to average about 3 million viewers per episode, a far cry from 7.7 million, but a great number in the land of cable. The show has been the No. 1 scripted cable sitcom among adults 18-49 (the coveted advertiser demographic) for the past five years.

Broadcast networks are seeing what happens when you diversify your lineup: ABC's black-ish and Fox's Empire racked up Emmy nominations this year and attracted major audiences. Empire became the first show in television history to increase ratings every week, ending its first season this spring with 21 million viewers.

Some credit success of The Game for setting the stage for shows such as Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder in proving that shows targeted to black viewers can be mainstream hits.

"People said, 'Oh look, there's success over in those hills, let's go over there and try some of that.' I do think we are seeing the reward," Akil says. "I'm saying reward because there's some good TV out there. Yes, there can be black leads on broadcast TV. And not only will it [work], it's going to make television history for your network."

Style on 08/04/2015

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