Fans, why did the ratings slide?

[flemm]

I can't say I agree with the market saturation theory. After all, how many spin-offs of CSI are there in addition to Law & Order and its two spin-offs? And really all of those shows tend to be too formulaic for my tastes, but people seem to like them anyway.

Sure, but the market for sci-fi shows is probably smaller than for a show like Law & Order or CSI.

To make a deeper comparison, one would have to look at the ratings for a show like L&O and its spinoffs, which I confess I don't care to do.

Also, while DS9's ratings trended downward, they remained basically good, better than Voyager's, and even Voyager was basically a successful show.

 

[Sykonee]

When we talk about market saturation, let's not forget the first of the non-Trek spinoffs: Seaquest. And that one even got major network backing from NBC.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

Do you think it might have helped if TPTB had not begun VOY right after TNG ended, but rather started VOY near or at the end of DS9's run? Might it have helped to let DS9 stand on its own for a time?

Do you think it might have helped if TPTB had not begun VOY right after TNG ended, but rather started VOY near or at the end of DS9's run? Might it have helped to let DS9 stand on its own for a time?

Definitely they tried to shove far too much trek down everyone's throats at the same time and in the case of Voyager, the quality suffered because of it I believe.

DS9 was never going to be allowed a place in the sun. Berman made that quite clear to Behr and Moore.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

I can't say I agree with the market saturation theory. After all, how many spin-offs of CSI are there in addition to Law & Order and its two spin-offs? And really all of those shows tend to be too formulaic for my tastes, but people seem to like them anyway.

That's because there is a larger market for police procedurals that require virtaully no mental effort to understand on the part of the audience.

The audience for shows that say things you have to think about is much smaller and easier to saturate.

 

[Captain Fine]

I know I found s. 1 of DS9 kinda boring, and same with s. 2. For some reason or another, I caught the premier of s. 3 and was engrossed in this new enemy. It had the "previously on Star Trek DS9" showing clips from "The Jem'Hadar" and then I suddenly was into it again "I like this series! It's exciting!" :P

 

[-Brett-]

Bad PR.

I remember when the show was on the air, I saw a DS9 commercial and my jaw dropped in shock because I'd never seen one before. Or since. It was like a bigfoot sighting.

Unless you were really in to Star Trek, the entire run of the series could have slipped by without you ever hearing of "deep space nine", much less knowing what time it was on. That was tough to figure out even if you were following the show.

 

[Ro Boat]

Something that does not get accounted for in these threads is age. I'm 29. I started watching Trek when my father rented the video of STIV. Then, I started watching TNG some time during the middle of the 1st season.

By the time DS9 hit its 4th or 5th season, I was in high school. I played sports, joined clubs, did homework. Thus, I devoted less time to Trek. I usually caught episodes in reruns.

By DS9's 6th and 7th seasons, I was in college and working. I had no time for TV. I never really completed DS9 until I watched the DVDs five years after the show had gone off the air.

I don't think I am the only one with a similar experience. Those who grew up on TNG saw their lives change. They didn't have as much time for Trek. I never saw any of VOY's last five seasons until DVDs. I didn't even live in the US for most of ENT's run. Now, I love ENT as my second favorite behind TNG.

At the same time that this was happening, Trek didn't try hard to win new fans. Instead of starting fresh, it extended itself and matured. This was great for the fans, but difficult to come into if you were 8 in 1999 as I was 8 in 1987. There was also far less publicity backing Trek.

Also, the cultural milieu started to switch from SciFi to Fantasy (Harry Potter et al.). This was another strike against finding new, young fans to replace the wandering TNG diehards.

I think that many of these issues play into the ratings far more than quality. DS9 is the best written, directed, acted Trek. Nevertheless, its nature was not well-suited for bringing in the kind of audience that TNG pulled in. Nor was there a solid effort from Paramount to do so.

 

[Sykonee]

Saw this posted in the TNG version of this thread. Thought it'd be cool to see here too.

Emissary for the Total Win!

 

[PKTrekGirl]

1. I don't think the fanbase for DS9 is the same as that for TNG. To assume so, just because "Star Trek" is attached to both of them is a fallacy.

TNG, which is I assume what you hold as the benchmark here, is a happy shiny Trek for fans who like short stories about aliens of the week and Our Squeaky Clean, PC-Perfect Heroes running around the universe, helping everyone 'evolve' into something exactly like....well....THEM.

DS9? Ain't that.

The DS9 characters are far too busy trying to survive an intergalactic WAR, burying the dead, and saving the AQ from imminent conquest by a far superior force to worry about helping aliens of the week 'evolve' into a bunch of Federation Mini-Me's.

Thank the Prophets Picard wasn't running the Dominion War, or the entire AQ would have been under the control of the Dominion by the end of DS9. Because Picard would never in a million years have brought the Romulans into the war the way Sisko and Garak did.

No...DS9 was far too upsetting to fans of The Perfect Heroes....because DS9's heroes are far from perfect. They get their hands dirty - even bloody. They do not live in the utopian world that the TNG crew lives in on board their Ship of Peace, Tranquility, and Most of All, Perfection.

A better benchmark would be to measure DS9 against the performance of B5, which was on at the same time and also featured imperfect heroes and an intergalactic war (really, two) done in an extended arc format.

However, that is neither here nor there. I just don't think TNG and DS9 had the same audience, because they appealed to different sorts of fans. Yes, there was some overlap when it came to a core group of fans who will watch anything with the Star Trek name on it. But as has been evidenced by the ghastly box-office performance of Nemesis, that core fanbase is alot smaller than we like to admit here on a Star Trek message board.

2. I think the long story arcs played a part as well. Fans who were used to tuning in to Trek just when they happened to be at home found TNG easy to follow. But that same demographic would have dropped DS9 because they'd be lost quite quickly with that sort of viewing behavior. Remember, no TiVo or DVRs back then. At the very least, you had to have tapes for the VCR and a more than casual desire to watch the show, or you'd forget to tape it if you weren't going to be home. Not really conducive to the casual, drop-in fan.

3. As has been mentioned about 59,208,992 times in the past 7.5 years I've been moderating this forum, TNG faced virtually no competition when it came on the air - no other scifi shows, and cable as we know it now was in it's infancy.

DS9 had TNG, VOY, and B5 as direct competition for TV-watching hours...and aired during a time when cable was growing at explosive rates, thus creating ratings erosion throughout the industry - not just with regard to DS9.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Saw this posted in the TNG version of this thread. Thought it'd be cool to see here too.

Emissary for the Total Win!

This is interesting.

What I would really like to see, however, is a comparison covering the same period of 4 non-scifi shows which are fairly similar to each other. I know there is no such franchise, but we could make-do with some shows that are similar to each other - say, 4 cop shows.

I bet you'd see the shows in the 80's having larger market shares than the shows in the 90's, if you were careful to pick similar shows.

That was what the explosion in the cable biz was doing - fracturing the universe of possible audience members into a billion pieces.

 

[TheGodBen]

Saw this posted in the TNG version of this thread. Thought it'd be cool to see here too.

Fascinating graph, thanks for posting it.

I had no idea that Emissary was the highest rated episode of Trek, even better than AGT, that's a great thing to know. But the evidence is right before our eyes, that first season had a major drop-off of viewers from a high of 19 at the start to a low of 8.5 at the end. The other seasons dropped-off gradually but none of them were near that level of that first season.

 

[Michael]

Emissary for the Total Win!

I had no idea that Emissary was the highest rated episode of Trek, even better than AGT, that's a great thing to know.

Yeah, I think that's great, too. However, I would say it can be argued that the rating of the episode right after Emissary tells us more about what the people thought about it than the rating for the episode itself.

 

[TheGodBen]

Yeah, I think that's great, too. However, I would say it can be argued that the rating of the episode right after Emissary tells us more about what the people thought about it than the rating for the episode itself.

It's not as big as the drop-off in ratings after All Good Things, nobody seems to have watched TNG after that episode!

Oh, wait...

 

[Sykonee]

Yeah, I think that's great, too. However, I would say it can be argued that the rating of the episode right after Emissary tells us more about what the people thought about it than the rating for the episode itself.

Well, the drop after Encounter At Farpoint was fairly significant too. In fact, I think they both dropped by roughly 5.5 points each. Series premiers are usually big ratings grabs since they are heavily advertised beforehand, drawing in quite a few curious folk.

From the looks of that graph, the first TNG episode to reach Past Prologue's numbers was Reunification Part I -that's just an educated guess, because the episode following that spot is TNG's second highest rated episode, which, as far as I know, was "that episode with Spock in it".

 

[Warped9]

I think it's fair to say many folks may tune in for a pilot episode out of curiosity, but then there's often a likely dropoff because the pilot won't win everyone over.

 

[TheGodBen]

Well, the drop after Encounter At Farpoint was fairly significant too. In fact, I think they both dropped by roughly 5.5 points each. Series premiers are usually big ratings grabs since they are heavily advertised beforehand, drawing in quite a few curious folk.

But the problem is that DS9's ratings continually declined over the course of that first season, it's hard to tell because it is such a small graph but I can only see two points where the ratings increased that season. TNG on the other hand is a much more mixed bag, the ratings went up and down all throughout their first season. Overall both shows probably had similar ratings for their first seasons but the direction of the line shows that DS9 was going in the wrong direction.

It can't be a quality issue, TNG's first season was one of the worst in the whole franchise, and while DS9's first season was bad compared to what came later it was not as bad as TNG season 1. Oversaturation seems likely here, TNG's ratings in season 6 were dropping at the same rate as DS9 season 1.

 

[Sykonee]

It can't be a quality issue, TNG's first season was one of the worst in the whole franchise, and while DS9's first season was bad compared to what came later it was not as bad as TNG season 1. Oversaturation seems likely here, TNG's ratings in season 6 were dropping at the same rate as DS9 season 1.

Hm, I wouldn't be surprised if 'episode quality' was somewhat of an issue, but you're comparing the wrong seasons. You should be comparing DS9 S1 with TNG S6, and TNG was a stronger show at that point. If a more casual Trek audience only had time in their schedule for one Trek show, they'd probably go with TNG.[edit] But yeah, they both did slide at quite the same rate that spring of '93. Might there have been really good NBA and NHL Playoffs that year?


I wonder how X-Files was doing at that point...

 

[flemm]

As has been mentioned about 59,208,992 times in the past 7.5 years I've been moderating this forum, TNG faced virtually no competition when it came on the air - no other scifi shows, and cable as we know it now was in it's infancy.

DS9 had TNG, VOY, and B5 as direct competition for TV-watching hours...and aired during a time when cable was growing at explosive rates, thus creating ratings erosion throughout the industry - not just with regard to DS9.

This is the key point and is exactly what I was getting at above. The entire television landscape changed during this period, to the detriment of ratings on network television across the board. Any discussion of DS9's ratings decline has to take that overall trend into account.

Nightly network news, for example, has seen its ratings plummet due to the cable news explosion. Any meaningful ratings comparison would have to account for across the board ratings trends that occured during that same period, AND it would have to account for increased competition within the sci-fi market itself.

 

[Gotham Central]

One thing to take into consideration is the fact that the TV market changed dramatically by the time of DS9s 3rd season. TNG flourished because of syndication. It had much of that market to itself for a while. DS9 faced the opposite. Not only was the syndication market far more crowded, but it was shrinking. More shows were being pushed onto one of the new networks, while cable was expanding its offerings. Thus syndicated shows which used to enjoy primetime slots on independent stations, were kicked to less ideal times on stations that were now either affiliates of The WB or UPN.

I know that in Chicago, DS9 used to air on WGN. This proved to be a serious problem for DS9 in the 3rd largest market in the country. Beyond getting bumped for sports, it also competed for space with Tribune Entertainment's own block of shows and WB programming. I know that Chicago was one of two major cities where the 2 hour series finale was cut into two episodes.