TV Ratings (Tuesday 9th November) + My Axe List

[Jax]

^
The general viewing public knows nothing about how there show is doing most of the time, unless it gets cancelled but with episodes to burn off still, then people bail in numbers.

 

[gh4chiefs]

Well you may be right, maybe we watch it more than the general public. I do know that people that I talk to complain about getting interested in a show only to have it yanked away pretty quickly. It's my contention that the more they yank stuff, there's less and less motivation for viewers to invest their time in any new shows.

 

[Jax]

I agree that more people play the wait & see game for some shows and that ends up hurting some shows in their devut season's. The biggest problem is time shifting audience and a outdated way of measuring audiences...

2nd to that STUPID Network exec's...yes FOX I am looking at you

 

[mswood]

Because of overrun CBS would be best to have a pure non scripted night on sundays because Cold Case was hammered in the end by it being pushed so far out of its normal airtime and now the same is happening to CSI Miami.

That really doesn't make that much difference.

THe network gets very detailed reports on the performance and understands that OR can hurt the East Coast and Central time zones performance in the 10 pm hour. But they have the full detail from the Pacific coast to judge week to week performance. Plus they do have the majority of weeks that actually don't have an overrun (which hit more in the Fall then in the Spring).

The network just doesn't look at the season average. They look at all the data and they get a lot of it.

Cold Case was already seriously dropped (trends the networks don't like) it already had amassed a sizable catalog for cable and overseas sales, and it already had a fairly old audience. It was going to go.

Cold Case ratings were very stable and then it suffered weeks of overrun, people loss the show and when it did settle down back in a normal slot the ratings never recovered to what they were mere months before. CSI:Miami is already a toss up according to many other people and before this move, CSI: Miami was one of the strongest CBS shows because of the demo it could produce at 10pm.

Cold Case's ratings weren't stable. They weren't awful or anything, but they had been declining. I track Sunday (thinks to TAR) and have detailed breakdown of retention lead in lead out, demographics for the figures CBS releases, and the last year Cold Case was on in the 9pm hour it was showing marked decreases in adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, and for the first time (since TAR moved to Sunday) was not only getting beat in teh adult 18-49 demo but was often losing to TAr in adults 25-54, as an show with an older audience (and that played well on Sunday before TAR arrived and showed that shows could get ok adult 18-49), but with CBS pushing to maximize its adult 18-49 ad friendly and revenue generating age group, Cold Case had to not show declines. As shows age, they get put into later time slots, where the financial risk is lessoned for the network. And yes SUnday at ten is just one step above being put on the Friday schedule. But the show had rising cost due to a fairly steady actors troop and producers that had been with the show from the get go, make it difficult for what used to be a moderate success to thrive as it ages.

And yes the ratings take a hit at 10 pm, but again the network sees not only national numbers but gets the breakdown per market and per timezone, a poster at pifeedback would post those and you could track the specific markets, and you could see that the pacific markets reflected the overall season decline that impact the east coast and central time zone. Ie, and overruns have absolutely no effect in the pacific time zones, nor would it impact their audience in returning week to week.

As for CSI NY its actually (to date) doing better retention wise then from its 9 pm hour. And thats with a 9pm hour thats doing better then CBS has had in years.

As for it being a possible cancellation target this year, that is true, but that has less to do with its own performance and more to do with the state of the full schedule. When you schedule is performing better then other networks (which it is) you still cancel the same number of shows (history shows that this happens no matter how well or how poorly your network is doing) as newer shows generally cost less and you always think that a newer show has the possibility of breaking out.