You knew it couldn't last, this mature and wholly unnatural calm around the networks. And on Wednesday, whatever tranquilizer was being slipped into Hollywood's water supply abrupt ran out. Three, count 'em, three shows were canceled: the remarkably unfunny Kelsey Grammer sitcom Hankand the witchy drama Eastwick at ABC, and Fox's jiggly but inscrutable Joss Whedon sci-fi vehicle Dollhouse. Cause of death in each case was severe Nielsen anemia.
If only NBC had six other nights of football
NBC's ratings generally seem to be headed for a spot on the ocean floor right next to the Titanic -- some of its primetime shows were even beaten out by Fox News coverage of the Fort Hood shootings last week -- but there was a rare bright spot Sunday. With a TV-season-high 19.8 million viewers, the Dallas-Philadelphia game on NBC's Sunday Night Football clobbered everything: Desperate Housewives, 60 Minutes, Fox's highly-promoted Family Guy special. And Michael Vick wasn't even playing.
How much do we love hungry lizards? LOTS.
ABC's Tuesday debut of V pulled in 13.9 million viewers. That's not just the highest-rated series premiere of this season, but of the past five seasons. Last show to grab that big an audience for its first episode: ABC's Lost, in 2004. The chances for a two-episode crossover in which the V lizards visit the island and one or more of them have sex with Sawyer, I suspect, just doubled.
'Southland': It ain't over 'til it's over
Southland, the NBC cop drama canceled before a single episode of its second season could air, isn't quite dead yet. Executive Producer John Wells called the cast late last week to report two other networks have shown interest in picking the show up, says the Hollywood Reporter. One of them is almost certainly TNT, which shares a corporate umbrella with Warner Bros. Television, the studio that produces the show. Before cheering too wildly, Southland fans need to recognize that if the show moves to cable, costs will almost certainly have to come down. If you hear an announcement that Southland has been picked up by TNT, watch out for a wave of cop-killings.
How much does South Florida hate the new TV season?
A ton. In the Nielsen ratings for the week of Oct. 5, only two of the new shows from broadcast television made the top 30, both from CBS. NCIS: Los Angeles, with 151,000 viewers, came in at No. 12. And The Good Wife, with 121,000 viewers, was No. 25. At the top of the ratings, not surprisingly, was ESPN's coverage of the Dolphins-Jets game, which pulled in 241,000 viewers.
Jay Leno: Threat or menace?
NBC has been in free-fall since 2004, but the way everybody's screaming about it, you'd think Jay Leno's move to prime time is responsible for everything that's gone wrong. There's an interesting story about the debate in Monday's New York Times, but you've got to practically to the end to get to the real point:
[NBC has concluded] that hits cannot be established at 10 anymore, largely because the hour is dominated by viewers playing back recorded shows on digital video recorders...Indeed, ABC’s performance is certainly providing some cover for NBC’s move at 10. Mr. Leno is already faring as well or better than two new ABC dramas, The Forgotten and Eastwick, and he is not far behind a third, Castle. All those shows cost three times as much or more per episode as Mr. Leno’s show.
At the root of the Leno move is an NBC belief that the old network business model is dead, that audiences will continue to decline not just for NBC but for all network shows as home entertainment options multiply and the audience continues to fractionalize. In turn, NBC reasons, the big budgets of scripted programming (especially the very expensive drama form) can no longer be supported -- and the future lies with cheaper programming. The drop in ratings at 10 p.m., in this thinking, is just the tip of an advancing iceberg.
This is not as radical as NBC's critics (most of them aggrieved producers who see a declining demand for their shows) are making it sound. Fox and The CW have never offered The next few months will tell us much about whether NBC is on the right track. It's also possible that NBC is partially right -- that there's a big enough audience for the foreseeable future to support one or two network slates of dramas at 10 p.m., but not three. What were interesting to me were the reports last week that Comcast, which is talking about buying part or all of NBC, would keep companyboss Jeff Zucker in place if the sale goes through. That suggests to me that the money people -- that is, the ones who matter -- think he's placed the right bet.
UFL: The Unknown Football League?
Talk about a marriage of the doomed! The United Football League, a new pro football venture, debuted last week on the facing Versus sports network. The result: about 146,000 viewers in the 18-to-49 age demographic. That's about 13 percent lower than the average Versus audience, which is already down at levels nearing Nielsen brain death.
The UFL -- a four-team league that operates in Orlando, Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York -- hitched its wagon to the Versus star at the worst possible moment, just as the tiny cable channel was getting itself kicked off DirecTV's satellite dishes in a rate dispute. That bounced Versus out of 18 million American homes, though the network claims that enhanced availability through the rival Dish Network cut the loss to five million. Bottom line: The Lingerie Football League seems a good bet to outlast both the UFL and Versus.
'Cougar Town' lives, and 'Southland' dies
Television is full of surprises. I thought ABC's smarmy sex comedy Cougar Town was a dead solid lock for the season's first cancellation. Instead, the network just gave it a full-season order. Meanwhile, NBC has canceled cop drama Southlandwithout ever giving it a chance to air.
The show debuted last spring to good reviews and decent ratings and was renewed for a second season, which was scheduled to start Oct. 23. Six episodes were actually produced. But now the network, in what is apparently a cost-cutting move, has decided to hand the time slot over to the much-cheaper Dateline NBC.
It's tempting to consider Southland the first casualty of The Jay Leno Show, which has subtracted five hours from the NBC schedule that used to be available for dramas. That's certainly the attitude that Southland producer John Wells is taking. "I'm disappointed that NBC no longer has the time periods available to support the kind of critically-acclaimed series that was for so many years, a hallmark of their success," he said after getting word of the cancellation. (He's going to try to place Southland on another network, Wells added.)
But the hour was available for Southland. And if NBC's new dramas Mercy and Trauma weren't struggling in the Nielsen ratings, no doubt NBC would have gone ahead with Southland. The real problem appears to be a growing disenchantment at NBC with all forms of scripted programming. Reality programs, game shows and news are much cheaper to produce; they can prosper at Nielsen levels that represent brain death for scripted programming. By this time next fall, the NBC schedule may consist of 30 Rock, Leno and 14 hours of The Biggest Loser.
So long, 'Three Rivers,' it was nice knowing you for a week
You television viewers are a mysterious bunch. Sunday's Nielsen ratings for the debut of Three Rivers, a new CBS medical drama that while not particularly original is far from the worst show on TV, were lousy: just 9.2 million sets of eyeballs. That's the worst debut of any new series this fall except for Fox's Brothers, which airs on Friday nights when only reanimated zombies and animatronic Disney characters are watching TV. The biggest debut of the fall was also for a CBS show, the so-generic-it's-unwatchable spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles. It pulled in 18.3 million viewers, almost twice as many.
Fox News wins another ratings victory
When Barack Obama won the presidency last November, he didn't realize he had a running mate. No, not Joe Biden: Fox News. The network's ratings have gone nowhere but up since Obama took office in January. The latest quarterly Nielsen ratings, released Wednesday, Fox News had a bigger audience than CNN and MSNBC combined, not only in total viewers but in the 25-to-54 age demographic that news executives aim for. In prime time, Fox News had 2.25 million viewers; the other two, 1.73 million. In the demo, Fox News had 583,000; the others, 558,000.
Even more indicative of the Fox News surge than the gross numbers audience numbers are the trends. Not surprisingly, CNN and MSNBC both a substantial number of viewers who came aboard for last year's election: CNN's prime-time audience wasdown 30 percent from the year-ago numbers, MSNBC's 10 percent. But Fox News was actually up 2 percent. The trend was the same across all hours and demographics.
Fox News also had the top-rated 13 shows in cable news -- including, at No. 3, with 2.8 million viewers, Glenn Beck. That's a remarkable number for a show that doesn't even air in primetime, and spells doom for the advertising boycott mounted by Beck's enemies. However many advertisers have left (the boycotters say several dozen, Fox News says just a fraction of that), they aren't going to stay away long in the face of those kinds of ratings.
The people who might be worrying a bit more about advertising are MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Olbermann's audience was down 10 percent from last year (and 21 percent in the demographic). Maddow's decline is downright alarming. Her show went on the air in September 2008. A year later, she's lost 40 percent of her audience and a whopping 50 percent in the demographic.
