Ratings

TV’s ratings system is under siege and no one knows what’s popular. That may be bad news for viewers and writers alike.

So exactly what do broadcast networks do to get some hits again? Jaime Weinman has a few ideas

A lawsuit in India alleges that the Nielsen rating system is inherently flawed

This is a question that I occasionally have to turn over in my mind when I think about something like the ratings of American Idol. As you may have heard, the ratings for the season premiere were down considerably from last year, somewhere between 20% and 24% depending on what metric you use. But what does that mean exactly?

Here’s a reason why TV ratings have become more interesting in recent years: paradoxically, it’s because hardly anyone watches broadcast TV any more by comparison with previous eras. Television audiences are still large overall, and a major event (usually sports) can still pull in an old-fashioned mass audience, but cable has been chipping away at broadcast viewership since at least the ’80s, along with all the other things (VCRs, DVRs, the internet, more competitive networks). Whether the smaller audience have improved the quality of broadcast TV is another question (unlike cable programming, which obviously did improve since the early ’90s); probably it’s allowed some shows to survive that would once have been marginal, but it’s more likely that the standard for what constitutes marginal ratings have simply changed, and what was getting 9 million viewers in 1994 would be getting something like a third of that today. But the increasingly competitive world of TV and the famous fragmentation of the audience has made ratings more fun to follow. Instead of every show, even the failures, getting unimaginably huge numbers, we’re down to a point where the failures get amusingly low numbers – and we may soon reach the point where some broadcast shows get overall audiences that would be low by cable standards.

Sanitizing the Oscar front-runner is just the movie mogul’s latest outrage

Amateur participation is sky-high, so why is the Beautiful Game such a commerical flop in Canada?

With the news that ABC may keep Scrubs on for a ninth season, even though Zach Braff and other actors won’t be able to appear in more than a handful of the episodes, there are two questions: 1) Is this a good idea for the network? 2) Is this a good idea for the show? The answer to 1) is probably a “yes.” Scrubs is not a high-rated show, but because of its desirable demographics, it does better than any comedy ABC could put in its place, and if the network wants to bring back Better off Ted, they will need to keep Scrubs as a lead-in. If they try to renew Better off Ted and put it after a new comedy, or have it lead off the hour, it will probably die almost immediately. The main reason for renewing any show is that the network has nothing to put in its place — nothing that would get better ratings, I mean. Even if a show is missing a key element, like its lead actor, the brand name of a long-running show may be enough for it to out-perform anything new, and keeping the show on allows the network to plug a hole. I know I use baseball analogies too much, but it’s a bit like signing a veteran player. The team knows the player is not as good as he was, and that he won’t be able to contribute even at his current level for more than another year or so, but having him on the team allows them to have at least acceptable performance in that spot for a little while longer. If ABC brings back Scrubs without Braff, they’ll be able to put off worrying about that time slot, concentrate on the other holes they have to fill (after mistakes like the remake of Cupid, they’ve got plenty), and come back for that slot in a year.

After all the advance talk about how this might be the lowest-rated Oscar telecast of all time, it looks like this year’s ratings were 10% higher than last year’s.

I’m going to be Away From My Desk™ for a couple weeks, but I’ll continue to post here when I get the chance. I want to take the opportunity to encourage a little more audience participation (aka letting commenters do the work I’m supposed to be doing), so here’s a question: do you think Gossip Girl will ever be a hit? Even by the standards of the CW network?