TV Ratings (Thursday 29th September) + Friday

[gh4chiefs]

I'm thinking maybe the people in charge of promoting new shows on NBC need to be fired. All summer I saw promos for Prime Suspect which from what I could tell, made it out to be "Dirty Harriet" basically. Now i just saw a promo during the football game on NBC, that showed me a TOTALLY different kind of show than how they were selling it all summer.

So which is it NBC?

 

[the G-man]

Whatever gets you to watch, of course.

 

[gh4chiefs]

Yeah but it's a little late for that.

ETA: Point being, they've promoted a show ALL summer long one way. So people made a decision to watch or not (and it seems mostly NOT) based on those promos. So now it premiers to awful ratings and they decide to switch gears on the promos. Too F'ing late to save it I would imagine.

 

[Professor Zoom]

That's because even when no long likes NBC shows they still like NBC News and they were watching that before Leno.

What do you mean NBC news? At that time it's LOCAL news. They maybe the affiliate for NBC, but it's local. What you're suggesting is everyone in the country has a great local news broadcast on their NBC affiliate. Which is hard to believe.

People are changing the channel to Leno. (God knows why, he's as funny as a boil on your neck, but...)

People respect NBC News so that translate over to the local news because they share reports.

That might get them to TRY a specific local news, but that doesn't get them to STAY. If it sucks, it sucks, regardless of Brian Williams.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

People have always made decisions to watch shows based on promos (and also just not bothering to change the channel when the new show comes on - which requires that they be watching the show in the previous timeslot, of course).

So misleading promos are nothing new. If a promo makes a show look good, and you sample it, and you like it, it doesn't matter if the promo was inaccurate. But Playboy Club's and Prime Suspect's premiere numbers were so low, people weren't even sampling them at the levels needed to get past the inevitable second week drop. That shows that the problem is, the promos simply aren't reaching people (or are unappealing in themselves).

Even well-regarded Pan Am dropped 19% in the second week. That's not so bad of a drop compared with others I've seen. If it stabilizes in week three, they should be okay.

Here's a Deadline postmortem on some of this season's flops.

They're right about Playboy Club being hurt by the "who is this show for?" question. Needing to get corporate approval for how the Playboy brand is depicted killed any idea of it being a juicy, go-for-the-jugular revenge fantasy about bunnies vs the sexist creeps they work for (which could have been a hit with women) and the fact that it's on broadcast means there's no real sex appeal to bring in the male audience, so this idea was probably just a nonstarter to begin with.

I didn't even bother to sample Charlie's Angels or Prime Suspect.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Increasingly, I run into people I know who simply pay no attention to the new fall shows at all.

Well I think there are a lot of reasons for this, one being our plethora of entertainment choices nowadays (streaming, DVDs, bazillion cable channels, video games) but I've often wondered if the axe happy networks haven't done this to themselves.

I wonder if people don't just say, eff it, no need to get involved in a show just to see it get cancelled. And if it does catch on, then they can catch up with on Netflix or something.

I don't think people plan their viewing that precisely. They just watch a show and keep watching if it interests them. If it suddenly vanishes, they probably had no idea it was on the verge of cancellation, but there's plenty of other stuff to watch instead.

I really think it's just that people's tastes are being shaped into finer and finer points as they find more stuff competing for their attention. Do I want to watch Prime Suspect, which looks like Just Another Cop Show, or do I want to watch a reality show about fishermen, play Call of Duty, update my Facebook page or check out the latest in cute kitties on YouTube? The more stuff you can do, the less tolerance you have for anything that doesn't seem targetted at just your mood, at just that time.

Cable is capturing niche markets that cater to very specific tastes (I never thought I'd see an artsy zombie show!) but broadcast is still stuck with a general-interest business model that's going to make it difficult to follow suit.

Live TV also has a disadvantage that video games, DVDs, and the internet let you experience them on your own schedule. Anything that demands that you fit into its schedule is doing to seem oppressive and inconvenient. Sure, you can DVR shows but that means that half of the value of the ad revenues is gone.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I didn't even bother to sample Charlie's Angels or Prime Suspect.

I don't expect either to last much longer. I've liked Prime Suspect, to a degree, but Maria Bello's character is hard to connect with. And I think they made a mistake taking away the flaws of Helen Mirren's version.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

There are tons of shows with flawed leads and a law enforcement angle, but they're mainly on cable. I'm just not sure that sort of thing fits in with broadcast and if they put it on cable, it's just going to be one of many, jostling for attention.

I've already got my flawed-lead-character-cop-show in Justified. (If you want the lead to be female, there's always The Closer.) Does anyone really need two shows of that ilk to watch? That's getting into some pretty narrow tastes.

There are just too many cop shows on TV already. Every new cop show has to come out with something startlingly new, like Person of Interest, which has a Batman/sci-fi-lite angle, and two well known lead actors, to elevate awareness enough to get a healthy (but not earthshaking) premiere sampling.

 

[the G-man]

I didn't even bother to sample Charlie's Angels or Prime Suspect.

I don't expect either to last much longer. I've liked Prime Suspect, to a degree, but Maria Bello's character is hard to connect with. And I think they made a mistake taking away the flaws of Helen Mirren's version.

There's something about Mara Bello that I've always found incredibly off-putting.

 

[Starbreaker]

Prime Suspect is nothing like the Closer. Mario Bello is dirty.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

The season finale of Haven drew 1.803 million viewers and a 0.5 in the demo. The season average was almost exactly even with the first season.

 

[gh4chiefs]

So misleading promos are nothing new.

I guess I didn't make myself clear. PERHAPS one of NBC's problems is that they don't know how to promo a show to make people want to sample it. Clearly "Mean bitch with a gun" was not the approach to take for Prime Suspect, and while I haven't watched the show, I now the get the feeling that really isn't what the show is. (Not unlike how Gran Torino was really NOT Granda Dirty Harry.) But it sure as hell was promo'd that way OVER and OVER all summer long.

Maybe the suits at NBC need to take a look at whoever is in charge of promos.

 

[gh4chiefs]

Increasingly, I run into people I know who simply pay no attention to the new fall shows at all.

Well I think there are a lot of reasons for this, one being our plethora of entertainment choices nowadays (streaming, DVDs, bazillion cable channels, video games) but I've often wondered if the axe happy networks haven't done this to themselves.

I wonder if people don't just say, eff it, no need to get involved in a show just to see it get cancelled. And if it does catch on, then they can catch up with on Netflix or something.

I don't think people plan their viewing that precisely. They just watch a show and keep watching if it interests them. If it suddenly vanishes, they probably had no idea it was on the verge of cancellation, but there's plenty of other stuff to watch instead.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I think people, who are regular TV viewers, care a great deal about what's on week to week, and are being turned off by instability.

 

[Professor Zoom]

There are tons of shows with flawed leads and a law enforcement angle, but they're mainly on cable. I'm just not sure that sort of thing fits in with broadcast and if they put it on cable, it's just going to be one of many, jostling for attention.

I think with NBC ratings where they are, they should ABSOLUTELY do what cable has done. With flaws and everything. Be fucking DARING. What else do they have to lose?

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Terra Nova held up great in the demo. It got a 3.0/8 in the fast nationals, compared to a 3.1/8 for its premiere.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Clearly "Mean bitch with a gun" was not the approach to take for Prime Suspect

Why not? Maybe NBC's marketing did some research and found that "Mean bitch with a gun" would attract a good-sized audience.

Given the economy and the surly mood everyone is in, I wouldn't be surprised if going a bit nastier than is usual for bland broadcast could work. Maybe that's what Playboy Club needed - to be a show about downtrodden bunnies getting back at the sexist pigs in the clubs might have locked in a female audience and the male audience was a lost cause because broadcast can't compete with internet porn.

There are tons of shows with flawed leads and a law enforcement angle, but they're mainly on cable. I'm just not sure that sort of thing fits in with broadcast and if they put it on cable, it's just going to be one of many, jostling for attention.

I think with NBC ratings where they are, they should ABSOLUTELY do what cable has done. With flaws and everything. Be fucking DARING. What else do they have to lose?

It seems to have worked pretty well for both ABC with Pan Am and FOX with Terra Nova. Poor NBC, theirs was the only cable experiment to flop (Playboy Club)!

So if NBC's other experiment was to try to position Prime Suspect as "Mean bitch with a gun" a la cable, we can't fault them for trying I suppose.

 

[Professor Zoom]

So if NBC's other experiment was to try to position Prime Suspect as "Mean bitch with a gun" a la cable, we can't fault them for trying I suppose.

Actually, I don't they should've gone with the "Mean bitch with a gun." That's cliche and been done. I think they should've gone with a closer adaptation of the original Prime Suspect. Functional alcoholic. Someone with real demons.

 

[gh4chiefs]

Clearly "Mean bitch with a gun" was not the approach to take for Prime Suspect

Why not? Maybe NBC's marketing did some research and found that "Mean bitch with a gun" would attract a good-sized audience.

Why not? Seriously? Have you seen the ratings? Clearly that approach to the promos didn't work. IF that's what their research told them, they need to find some new research guys.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

It's pretty common to do a thorough and responsible amount of marketing research, think you're onto the right approach, have plenty of evidence to back you up, and then have it not work for whatever reason. Happened to me plenty of times.

So the fact that the MBw/G approach didn't work is not evidence that the marketing people are asleep at the switch. Marketing is a very inexact science. There could have been something in the execution of the campaign that screwed it up. No amount of research can check for every detail that might or might not matter. As long as the marketing folks can prove to the boss "hey we did our job" and throw a lot of Excel and Powerpoint at him to prove it, their jobs are probably secure.

For starters, people will tell you "I want X" and they may actually believe they want X, but when you show them X, they don't want it. Maybe they wanted something else that they thought was X, instead of your interpretation of X. Maybe they were just lying to you and to themselves, and they don't actually want X, they just want to think of themselves as the kind of person who wants X. People lie to themselves a lot, really I think that's 90% of what they do on a daily basis. People don't know what they fuck they want.

 

[gh4chiefs]

The overall performance of NBC is pretty much a clue there's a problem somewhere.