Weighty Dramas Flourish on Cable

The new FX drama “Justified,” a contemporary cop show so steeped in the iconography of the Western that its first episode included no fewer than two pistol draws, attracted 4.2 million viewers and the biggest ratings for a drama premiere on the channel in eight years.

At the same time, the first new episode this season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” a corrosive character study about a terminally ill chemistry professor turned crystal meth pusher, eclipsed even that network’s big hit “Mad Men” in many ratings categories, drawing just over two million viewers, but 3.3 million when its immediate repeat is included.

The success of both shows — following a succession of drama hits on cable channels like USA, TNT and ABC Family — comes at the same time when broadcast networks are struggling to find hourlong shows that can last even a full season — especially in the 10 p.m. hour.

The shift to cable also reflects a changing business model for the drama, one that is no longer dependent on making 100 or more episodes to sell in syndication. Instead, these cable dramas rely on tighter budgets, subscription fees paid by cable operators, smaller deficits and most crucially, investment by international networks.

Over all, the broadcast networks still churn out a higher total number of drama hours than the 10 or so basic cable channels in the drama business. (Adding pay channels like HBO and Showtime and Starz, the numbers are closer.) But a shift, if not quite a sea change, is taking place.

The Sony Pictures Television studio, for example, which produces both “Justified” and “Breaking Bad,” generates more hours of drama for cable channels now than it does for broadcasters, even though cable networks pay less — closer to $1 million an episode — than the $1.5 million networks pay to license shows.

So the cable shows are produced at lower costs — closer to $2 million an episode on average, as opposed to about $3 million for network shows.

“I do think the cable number will grow and the gap with broadcast nets will narrow significantly,” said Steve Sternberg, a longtime television research analyst who now writes his own blog, the Sternberg Report. “TNT, FX, USA, AMC, Syfy, ABC Family and others have a number of dramas that have already been picked up for next season. And most of those currently on the air have been renewed. I suspect as the summer starts to get more saturated with first-run cable dramas than ever, we’ll see more in the fall and spring.”

NBC was criticized for giving up on scripted drama when it moved Jay Leno’s comedy hour into the 10 p.m. slot last fall; now it is trying to recover with shows like “Parenthood” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” ABC continues to add to a long list of shows, like “The Forgotten” and “The Deep End,” that have crashed and burned at that hour.

In recent years, only CBS has had any real success with the 10 p.m. drama, with shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Mentalist.” (Fox Broadcasting stations typically program news at 10 p.m.)

John Landgraf, the president of FX, which has built perhaps the strongest reputation for high-quality drama on basic cable because of series like “The Shield,” “Rescue Me” and “Damages,” said, “What’s happened is, with rare exceptions, like ‘Lost,’ the networks don’t program the 10 p.m. drama anymore.”

He defined that less as a time period (ABC’s “Lost” plays at 9) than a form: the experimental, breakthrough network show, like “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere” and “NYPD Blue,” that networks used to schedule at 10.

“Now they program 9 p.m. shows as 10 p.m. shows,” Mr. Landgraf said, citing the CBS hit “The Mentalist,” a crime procedural, which was moved to 10 p.m. this season. “The hour at 10, after the parents put the kids to bed, was where networks could experiment with deeper characterization and deeper serialization. Now it’s just tough for them to do that. When every episode is interchangeable with every other episode of a show, that’s good for them.”