MMA gets network TV deal

The fight for young male television viewers just got bloodier.

CBS, which once filled the airwaves on Saturday nights with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” said Thursday it has signed a deal to broadcast mixed-martial arts bouts on TV’s slowest night, marking the biggest showcase yet for the newly popular combat sport.

CBS announced it will air four two-hour MMA fight cards during the next year produced by Elite Xtreme Combat, which already stages fights on CBS’ premium cable network, Showtime. The deal could be extended if deemed a success, a network executive said.

The unexpected union reflects the desirability of MMA’s typical audience of 18-to-34-year-old men.

“Sure, the ‘Tiffany network’ did bring us ‘All in the Family,’ and Edward R. Murrow, and these fights may not be what the network’s older audience is used to,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “But have you watched ‘Big Brother’ this season?

“CBS and all the networks are desperate to find the next big idea, and it’s not completely wrong to think this is it.”

MMA fighting on CBS is scheduled to debut as early as April 26, said Elite XC’s Gary Shaw, a boxing promoter who got into the MMA business in late 2006.

“This sport has gone from the underground to regulation, to pay-per-view, to cable TV to CBS,” Shaw said. “These are not street or cage fighters, they are true athletes.”

Elite XC doesn’t boast the deep roster of talent in the better-known MMA organization known as Ultimate Fighting Championship, which negotiated with CBS in the fall during the writers’ strike but failed to come to terms. “I’m not going to cut a stupid deal,” UFC President Dana White said Thursday.

Shaw plans to have onetime street fighter Kimbo Slice headline the first CBS show. Elite XC also employs Gina Carano, who is known as “Crush” on NBC’s “American Gladiator,” and former UFC light-heavyweight champion Frank Shamrock.

The UFC, stocked with MMA stars such as Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Anderson Silva, made its own step into the mainstream Thursday when it announced an advertising deal with Anheuser-Busch. The UFC octagon mat will be sponsored by Bud Light starting at the May 24 pay-per-view fight, and White said the legitimacy that came with the sponsorship made him as proud “as the day we became sanctioned in Nevada.”

“We’re . . . following the consumer and what they are interested in,” Anheuser-Busch spokesman Tony Ponturo said.

UFC generated revenue of more than $200 million from 10 pay-per-view shows in 2006, and its “Ultimate Fighter” reality shows on cable’s Spike TV outdrew four ESPN “Monday Night Football” games in 2007, and a World Series game in 2004 among males 18 to 34, White said.

The CBS deal is “clever” and “not a huge risk,” Syracuse’s Thompson said. “Saturday nights are TV graveyards anyway, if it crashes and burns, CBS can just move it back to Showtime.”

Kelly Kahl, the senior executive vice president of CBS prime time, said, “The bar for success is not very high. But we’re curious to see what happens.”

Wooing the 18-34 demographic is critical for CBS, said Kahl, allowing network advertisers to expand their base to “an audience that doesn’t come naturally to CBS.” Those millions of elusive TV viewers tend to be looser with their disposable income than families or senior citizens.

Veteran boxing promoter Bob Arum, meanwhile, said he’s in talks to bring his Top Rank bouts to network TV again.

“This is good, it opens up Saturday night to show the networks aren’t going to just settle for that part-time, awful programming,” Arum said. “I think there’ll be spots for boxing too.”

Shaw and White both said, however, that boxing has no chance of returning to prime-time network TV.

“The demographics of boxing isn’t there for the networks,” White said. “Our fighting is exciting, it’s sexy, it’s fun.”

MMA allows fighters to employ the skills of judo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, kickboxing and boxing, creating some violent action in bouts such as last month’s UFC lightweight title fight. B.J. Penn opened up a nasty cut by slamming an elbow into the forehead of opponent Joe “Daddy” Stevenson as both men tussled on the mat. Action can also remain almost exclusively upright, such as Liddell’s compelling toe-to-toe battle with Wanderlei Silva in December.

Syracuse’s Thompson said Thursday was a landmark day for the sport.

“Ultimate fighting used to be so underground you almost had to know a secret knock to watch it on TV,” Thompson said. “But then as they started making rules -- no kicking in the groin, no eye-gouging -- it’s moved into the realm of still brutal, like boxing and football, but acceptable.

“Saturday night at the fights is an old idea, but this sport reminds me of NASCAR. A few years ago it was looked at as jokey and low-brow, but that’s really changed.”

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Times staff writer Scott Collins contributed to this report.

lance.pugmire@latimes.com