Networks seek viewers
Anybody want to buy a TV season?
It’s slightly used. And, with the looming threat of a writer’s strike, it could soon be feeling the effects of a fuel shortage.
Just five weeks in, the fall 2007 TV season isn’t performing so well.
“Viva Laughlin,” CBS’ musical whodunit, was yanked after only two airings.
NBC’s “Bionic Woman” premiered with all the promising power of its heroine. But in five weeks, its drawing power has ebbed from 13.9 million to 7.8 million viewers.
ABC’s “Pushing Daisies” received a warm welcome from critics and viewers alike – and a full-season order from the network – but this mystical crime romance will have to prove that its exotic formula (and eye-popping look) can be sustained week after week.
The premiere of the network’s “Samantha Who?” cracked the Nielsen top 10, and it nearly equaled its viewership with 13.7 million in week two.
But before declaring “Samantha” a breakout hit, remember this: It follows the huge hit “Dancing with the Stars.” And “Dancing” stops dancing in a month.
“Gossip Girl,” the CW’s adolescent soap, is a certified success by its own peculiar standard, with a full-season pickup.
Sure, the audience is tiny – about 2.5 million viewers. But they’re an elite gathering of the young, eager-to-spend demographic targeted by the CW.
There’s no breakout hit like last fall’s “Heroes,” which, besides seizing a hefty audience, did something else: With its addictive formula of sci-fi mysticism with the world at stake, it seems to have set the stage for several of this fall’s new shows, among them far-from-heroic performers such as NBC’s “Journeyman,” the CW’s “Reaper,” CBS’ “Moonlight” and the aforementioned “Bionic Woman.”
With viewers harder than ever to snag, no wonder the meter readers at Nielsen are hard at work searching for new ways to quantify the audience.
This fall, Nielsen introduced a much-anticipated method that doesn’t bother counting who’s watching the shows. It counts who’s watching the commercials.
Called C3, it measures the average audience for all commercials within a given show – and not just while they’re aired, but also when they’re replayed on digital video recorders anytime during the next three days.
This means if you have a habit of channel-surfing or fast-forwarding to bypass commercial breaks … as of now, you’re busted!
But why are you still watching TV shows on television anyway? Why watch “The Office” on television Thursday night, when you can watch it at your office on a PC the next day?
While they voice concern about audience erosion, the networks keep giving viewers reasons not to watch television by offering them more shows on other devices. (Just this week, NBC and Fox have started a test version of an online video site called Hulu.com.)
With all sorts of new outlets being cultivated for what used to be known as a “TV show,” the people still known as “TV writers” want their cut of this potential new windfall.
Their thus-far-unmet demand to share in expanding “digital revenues” is one of the issues driving a wedge between the writers and the media bosses they write for.
The union’s contract expired at midnight Wednesday. A strike could happen as early as today, with writers meeting Thursday night to discuss whether to walk out or continue to work without a contract while seeking a deal.
Conventional wisdom says a strike would be a bad thing. But recently, L.A. Weekly’s Nikki Finke reported that some network bosses not only don’t care if there’s a strike, but welcome it, having already given up the season for dead.
True or not, that sounds pretty messed-up, especially since a strike, if it happens, could drag on long enough to cripple the development of next fall’s shows, too. (The last such strike, in 1988, lasted 22 weeks.)
What would be the more immediate impact on viewers? Once the pipeline of fresh scripted comedies and dramas starts sputtering, you can expect more reality shows, made on the fly and on the cheap – plus lots of reruns and more “Dateline NBC.”
By comparison, even “Cavemen” is starting to look good.