Would there have been seven seasons if there were no Seven?

[Guy Gardener]

And that's why the two of you could be twin sisters.

[teacake]

Oh yes, and the jelly pool and..

[DeepSpaceWine]

Simply put. Yes.

I have the ratings for every single episode, even the nigh-impossible to find 9/12/01 rerun. If you analyze the ratings from Season 4, besides seeing that it was down over Season 3 you'd see a big drop down from Fall 97 to Winter 98 and when you parse the ratings out further, you can see what really happened.

Ratings for new eps in Fall 1997 were up +0.28 over Spring 1997 (+6%), but ratings fell -0.90 in Winter 1998 (-18%). Take out "Scorpion, Part II" and you get +0.12 & -0.74 respectively (+3%, -16%). Take out "The Gift" too and it drops to just +0.4% for Fall 1997. What does that mean? The boost was Scorpion, not Seven. And if not for Scorpion, the fall block of Season 4 severely underperformed the average of all fall blocks (when I mean fall blocks, I mean the episodes airing through November or early Dec). Some may argue Seven prevented a bigger ratings plunge and she may very well have, but the plunge in Winter 1998 is so bad (and followed up by a down Spring 98 too), that would suggest otherwise.
[I gotta post all the ratings data & analysis for Star Trek series and other shows sometime]

For context, the only times Voyager's ratings grew block over block were Fall 1996, Fall 1997, Fall 1998, Winter 1999, Fall 2000, Spring 2001. Both Voyager & DS9 had a problem with their ratings in spring.

And I'm not sure what's behind Winter 1998's drop. It looks bigger than competition with the Winter Olympics at Nagano and the loss of the Milwaukee market (anyone watching Voyager in the Milwaukee area probably remembers that time) would suggest.


Voyager was UPN's top-rated show til 1999 and 2nd highest rated show thru 2001. WWF SmackDown! was the highest rated show in Voyager's last 2 seasons but Voyager still led among all real scripted dramas & sitcoms. And it was no contest. The next series was a distant 2nd or 3rd. They would have been foolish to deep six their flagship series.

[Guy Gardener]

I've seen the graphs. The only marks that matters is the first and final show of each series.

http://www.madmind.de/wp-content/upl...lsenrating.jpg

The first episode of Voyager was 5 points lower than the last episode of TNG, and the penultimate episode of Voyager was 4 points lower than the First episode of Enterprise.

That shows that a chunck of the TNG audience didn't want to give Voyager a chance, and 7 years later they can back to see if Archer was worth their time, and from the looks of those ratings, it wasn't.

[Dream]

Guy Gardener wrote:

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I've seen the graphs. The only marks that matters is the first and final show of each series.

http://www.madmind.de/wp-content/upl...lsenrating.jpg

Your link doesn't work.

That shows that a chunck of the TNG audience didn't want to give Voyager a chance, and 7 years later they can back to see if Archer was worth their time, and from the looks of those ratings, it wasn't.

DS9, VOY and ENT had huge ratings for their first episodes, many people did give them chance, but the problem was that the audience didn't stick around after seeing the debuts.

VOY was always "safe" since it always got good ratings compared to the rest of the crap on UPN.

[teacake]

Who are these lazy people who don't know you have to grit your teeth through a first season?

[mos6507]

"Who are these lazy people who don't know you have to grit your teeth through a first season?"

The TNG-era shows had it easy. TNG took 3 seasons to hit its stride, where TOS was canceled after 2 and barely made it back on the air for the 3rd. A certain amount of survival pressure is a good thing.

[Guy Gardener]

Dream, some sites are assholes and don't let you link to them directly, it's probably to stop the hotlinking of images, but if you copy and past the link into a fresh tab, it will work.

[Dream]

mos6507 wrote:

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The TNG-era shows had it easy.

Don't forget ENT, dead after 4 seasons.