Coming back to a couple points here...
Sci said:
No, not really. That's it. That's the essence. You have to attract and retain enough viewers that the company can either make money by 1) selling ads, or 2) by receiving subscription income. Without that, commercial television programs cannot stay in production.
Tell that to Jamie Kellner, who first cancelled Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Pinky and the Brain & Animaniacs on WB in the late 90s and then cancelled WCW Nitro on TNT and WCW Thunder on TBS in 2001, despite all of them doing pretty well in the ratings for their time.
"Doing pretty well in ratings" is not the issue per se. As I said, the issue is attracting and retaining enough viewers that the company can make money by selling ads. In other words -- it's not just about ratings, it's about whether or not advertisers are willing to buy time on your show.
What matters if a show is expensive to produce, if a show is financially successful (in the black) or not (in the red),
A broadcast network show gets in the read or the black by having ratings high enough that advertisers want to spend enough money buying time on the show's commercial breaks that it pays for the show.
Perhaps UPN should have premiered “Babel One” and the preceding episodes “Daedalus” and “Observer Effect” during sweeps in February and try to get higher ratings, instead of in January while not even advertise the return of Enterprise from its month long break.
Perhaps. But that doesn't mean the show would have done well even then. As I said before, the highest ratings any ENT episode got that season was 3.8 million, for the last two. In 2005, when most of ENT's direct competition had ratings two or three times that high, and when the biggest shows had ratings more than six times higher than that, 3.8 million was just not enough for advertisers to pay enough to reach a sufficient profit for UPN and Paramount. As I've said before, I distinctly remember that ENT in Season Four was literally not even able to sell enough commercials to fill its entire time slot -- they had to start airing these awkward interstitials that said, "Stay tuned for
Star Trek: Enterprise!" because they just literally could not sell enough ads.
CBS,NBC, ABC & FOX aren’t UPN; even FOX isn’t not considered one of the Big Three networks.
By 2005, that "Big Three" distinction had begun to melt away, though it wasn't quite gone. But either way, 3.8 million -- ENT's
best ratings of the season -- were absolutely not high enough to attract enough advertisers. That was even
with the advertisers grading UPN on a curve.
Sci said:
Likely the only reason UPN didn't cancel ENT after season three was that it was worth Paramount's while to get the series to about 100 episodes, because that was the point at which syndicated reruns could become valuable to broadcast stations and cable networks at the time. But the amount of money Paramount would likely lose from trying to produce a fifth season with insufficient advertising revenue would probably have negated syndication profits if the show had remained in production.
Then film the season, wait until the merger is finished and air them as tv movies on CW.
You're saying they should have spent $17.6 million dollars with no return, sit on it for a year (for, again, a merger that was not on the table at the time they made the decision to cancel), and then air an unpopular show that had been losing audiences for years, without momentum, and thus probably get an even
smaller audience than they had already struggled with.
You are, in other words, saying that they should have set $17.6 million on fire, since they knew they were losing audiences and would almost certainly
continue to lose audiences, and thus would almost certainly be unable to induce advertisers to pay for the cost of production.
That would not only have been a terrible business decision, but it would have been a terrible business decision that would likely have exposed Viacom to litigation from shareholders for willfully violating their legal obligation to make as much money as possible for shareholders.
But still matters as it suggest that there might have been a far larger audience watching through DVRs, and that there was no attempt to reach them to watch the first airing on a weekly basis.
That doesn't matter if advertisers don't think those additional audiences are worth spending the money to reach. In particular, they don't matter if the advertisers think those additional audiences are just gonna fast-forward through the commercials and thus never even
see the ads.
I don’t think that there was a weekly rating wars with Stargate, although if that was the intent, then no wonder Enterprise did not reach 4M viewers. They split the science fiction audience, as I’m sure that there were viewers of Stargate SG-1 watch watched Enterprise and vice versa. Was Moonves expecting the science faction version of the weekly wrestling tv wars of the late ‘90s and very early ‘00s here?
I think Moonves probably consider ENT's primary competition to be the other broadcast network shows that aired during the 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM Friday night timeslot. And as I said above, ENT got its ass kicked by all of those shows except two sitcoms on the WB -- and at least three shows that had ratings almos three times higher than ENT also got cancelled that year.
It might not have fared any better on Sci-Fi, since even Battlestar Galactica was cancelled after 4 seasons.
To be clear, BSG ended after Season Four because that was the creative decision of showrunner Ronald D. Moore. BSG was still a rating success by the Sci-Fi Channel's standards, and they wanted the show to continue (which is why after it ended, they immediately produced the prequel
Caprica, and then tried multiple times to launch new spin-offs).
And again, if there are ideas for a merger floating around, then very likely they were getting their accounting in order and removing anything that was in the red – cleaning up the books first. Meaning a show that is causing UPN to be in the red would be up for cancellation.
I mean, okay, but that's not much of an argument for why they should have kept ENT around.
Sci said:
Enough for the discrete costs of an episode? Yes, but would that have been enough to pay for the costs of keeping the actors on call, the crew on call, and keeping the sets standing on soundstages where other, more lucrative programs needed space? How much money would Paramount have lost by disrupting the ability of lucrative shows to build necessary sets because ENT's sets were just sitting there on the soundstages, unused?
We’ll never know, since it wasn’t tried.
I'm sorry, but no. When a show in 2005 has been around for years and KEEPS losing audiences no matter what has been tried -- when it gets to the point where it's only pulling an average of 3 million viewers at a time when its direct competition is getting 8-10 million and the real standards for success are pulling 15-25 million, and when it
literally can't sell enough ads to fill its time slot... at a certain point, we just have to accept that in the context of the 2005 market,
Star Trek: Enterprise was just not popular enough to be financially viable and was not financially successful enough to try to save.
Even though advertising a special Star Trek event on CW would have been a big deal at the time.
UPN had been advertising "special
Star Trek events for years." It was absolutely not a big deal at the time, and they were not successful at reversing the downward ratings trend.
What happened strikes me as either willful sabotage or plain incompetence.
I think you are not being realistic about what average ratings of 3 million for a very expensive, high-concept, special effects-heavy show meant in 2005 in terms of financial viability.
But with Moonves there was definitely a maliciousness to it.
I don't think so. To the extent that his dislike of science fiction mattered, I think it mostly just made him less pre-disposed to believe that ENT's ratings could reverse the downward spiral. But looking at the ratings,
I don't think there was any way to reverse the downward spiral in 2005, and I love this stuff. I don't think Moonves made the decision to cancel out of spite; he made the decision to cancel because ratings weren't high enough.
There were probably ways to have continued Enterprise for at least another season, if not two, if not on UPN then another network willing to air it. They might have needed to adjust to a smaller budget
To be clear, the budget for Season Four of ENT had already been cut by, IIRC, either 40% or 60%. One of the reasons they adopted the three-episode arc structure in S4 was that it let them use the same sets for each episode in that arc and thereby amortize production costs. There was not a realistic way to cut the budget any further.
It's one of the many reasons I love the novels, including the Enterprise relaunch novels. There was a dark period for Star Trek of about 10 years. Outside the 3 Abrams movies there really was no new Star Trek out there outside tie ins. In a way the novels kept Star Trek moving. They always say in entertainment when something is not moving it dies. Well the various tie ins kept Star Trek moving at least, maybe at a crawl, but it never died out. For me the novels kept Enterprise, TNG, DS9 and Voyager moving forward (as well as the original series, though those are usually standalone novels) until Star Trek finally returned to TV.
Totally agree here. In fact, personally I think of the period from 2001-2021 as a Golden Age of
Star Trek in novels.
) of the entire franchise, for me. And a general perception does prevail about ENT too, not dissimilar to mine.
