TV’s Upfront Week, once cheery, gets crabby, cramped and contentious

Making a buck in the TV business isn’t as easy as it used to be. As a result, the glitzy showcases that networks put on for their advertisers aren’t as much fun as they once were, either.

TV’s annual “upfront” has been a staple of the Madison Avenue calendar for decades. Since the 1960s, executives from at least one TV network have put on, as Ed Sullivan once said, “a really big show” for the top spenders from General Motors, Coca-Cola and Apple in hopes of securing millions of dollars ahead of the next programming season. Attendees regularly visited New York City, dined on chilled shellfish, drank free booze, collected TV-star autographs and met up with TV ad-sales executives and media buyers from their current agency of record.

Now this spectacle is decidedly less spectacular.

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