What Do TV Ratings Mean?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

This is a question that I occasionally have to turn over in my mind when I think about something like the ratings of American Idol. As you may have heard, the ratings for the season premiere were down considerably from last year, somewhere between 20% and 24% depending on what metric you use. But what does that mean exactly?

On one level, it means nothing, or at least nothing to us: the only ratings metric that really matters to a viewer is whether the show is low-rated enough to be canceled. American Idol remains the most popular show on television by almost any metric. It could lose 20% of its audience for years and still be considered a hit by today’s standards. It matters very much to networks whether their hit shows are doing better than the other network’s hit show; the winner gets bragging rights and higher advertising rates. But I don’t know that it really matters to us.

On another level, ratings matter because they’re a picture of trends – and in fact, like any poll, Nielsen ratings are probably better at showing trends than telling us exactly how popular something is. (Ratings can tell us, Continue…

TV Bashing vs. Internet Bashing

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

Another article that I heard a few people talking about over New Year’s was this piece on “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer. It’s a contribution to a familiar subgenre: talking about the need to slow down and collect our thoughts in an era where we’re being bombarded by screens, technology, information. After reading it, a friend speculated that there will come a day when people boast about not being on the internet, the way they used to boast about not owning a TV (a boast that no longer has any value, since you can watch TV without owning a TV). Even the writer of the article, you’ll notice, does not go that far; he takes a break from the internet sometimes and doesn’t connect when he leaves his computer, but some kind of internet connection is a necessity in his job.

That may prevent internet-bashing from being quite as big as TV-bashing was. Most of what a TV provided could be provided by some other medium – even real-time news updates, which the radio was fine for. So all you really had to reject by giving up TV was the entertainment programming; and that, of course, was precisely the point. But the internet is a combination of so many things, and some of them have replaced or supplanted other things. It was possible in 1997 to say you weren’t on the internet and be proud of it. Now, for many people, it would sound like a person of another era claiming not to use telephones. (There were people who refused to use telephones, I’m sure, but I don’t think it was cool the way doing without TV was considered sort of cool.)

Which may answer a question I’ve floated once or twice: why is it that bashing the internet has never quite taken off the way bashing TV did? Sure, there are lots of articles about what the internet is doing to our brains, and some of the things they say may even be true, but they usually carry with them a sense that the writer is descending into fuddy-duddyism. Whereas bemoaning the influence of TV has been a cottage industry literally since the medium became popular, and that attitude doesn’t carry the same penalty as being anti-internet. Criticizing the internet is taken as a sign that the writer cannot accept technological change and is mistakenly, nostalgically remembering the past as being smarter than it was. (And sometimes, maybe most times, that’s exactly how the writer comes off.) Saying the exact same things about TV – that it eats up too much of our time, paralyzes us with infinite choices, makes us passive, overloads us with meaningless information – has never carried the same stigma. But as I said, I think that’s partly because TV never became – for most people anyway – a necessary part of living and doing business, the way the internet is for many people.

Also, perhaps, there’s a selection bias here: attacks on one media tend to be most prominent in another, separate medium. So TV-bashing was most common in print and, before Hollywood studios accepted TV, in the movies. But print has been integrated with the internet for a long time now, and it just looks silly to bash the internet in a piece that is being read on the internet.

Sitcoms rule

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

CityTV; CTV; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

The biggest hit of the television season was supposed to be The X Factor, a reality performance show from American Idol’s Simon Cowell. But something has changed since the days when Idol and Survivor were crushing all other TV in North America. The X Factor is a success, but on Wednesday, it’s beaten in the ratings by the comedy Modern Family, and then it comes back on Thursday to lose to The Big Bang Theory. Meanwhile, new dramas like Pan Am and Terra Nova are getting trounced by comedies like the retooled Two and a Half Men, which is getting even more viewers with Ashton Kutcher than it did with Charlie Sheen. This scenario would have seemed bizarre only a few years ago, when reality and hour-long drama were the future of TV. But now everyone wants to do half-hour comedy. Matt Watts, a Canadian writer-performer who stars as a neurotic therapy subject in the CBC’s Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays (airing Tuesdays, but not Thursdays), told Maclean’s that although it’s “more dramatic than most half-hours,” if it were an hour-long drama, “it would be tedious.” Comedy is where the fun is, in more ways than one.

The death of the sitcom was a big story in the ’00s, when Lost and American Idol were the huge hits and Two and a Half Men (the Sheen version) was one of the few comedies in the top 10. Veteran drama and comedy writer Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) warned blog readers in 2007 that “comedy is coughing up blood right now.” Critics speculated that hour-long dramas with comedic elements, like Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, would replace the sitcom entirely; Emily Kapnek, creator of the popular new half-hour comedy Suburgatory, told Maclean’s there were “a lot of one-hours that wound up getting nominated in the comedy categories at awards show time.”

Continue…

The recession catches up to reality TV

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

GPhoto Illustration by Lauren Cattermole/Maclean's

Network executives think we want escapism in scripted TV: “Strategically,” ABC president Paul Lee told critics, “these are times when fairy tales play strongly.” But don’t tell that to the creators of reality shows.

The cheapest, quickest profit-making shows on television are facing up to the fact that we live in depressing times. In addition to the usual shows about weddings and failed relationships, cable networks have spent the last two years developing programs like Pawn Stars and Hardcore Pawn, the stories of pawnshops and the people who have to sell their stuff there. If you’d prefer to watch people buy things instead of selling them, Extreme Couponing has become a hit by featuring shoppers who try to get all the discounts they can, even if it means they have to stockpile detergent and toilet paper. Viewers may not be interested in escaping into a world of wealth and beauty; Simon Lloyd, CEO of reality-show producer Cineflix, told Maclean’s that today’s audiences “want to get value for money.”

The reality shows of the ’00s were often as escapist as today’s scripted shows, especially when it came to housing: Flip This House and its cousins told us there was a fortune to be made, while makeover shows emphasized the dream of living well. But today, because many people have less outsized ambitions, reality producers have moved to taking on more realistic dreams. The most popular reality sub-genre at the moment is the hoarder show, where the best anyone can do is move out of squalor.

Other recent shows acknowledge that we’ve given up hoping the future will be better than the past. In the Cineflix show American Pickers, and its spinoff Canadian Pickers, two men come into people’s homes and try to find valuable antiques among the old junk. Lloyd says that part of the appeal is that “a lot of things that are being bought and sold are from an era when times were good. There’s very much an element of nostalgia there. People aren’t buying things from the 1930s.”

Shows about getting rich quick have either died out or been forced to adapt to the new world. Flipping Out, finishing up its fifth season with solid ratings, began in 2007 as part of the house-flipping genre, with the star, Jeff Lewis, trying to make a fortune. After the housing market collapsed, we saw Lewis cut back his business and take on extra duties to stay afloat. Another recession-era take on house flipping, Flip Men, has its stars buying problematic homes at today’s rock-bottom prices; Lloyd’s company has one called The Unsellables about houses that can’t sell. “That was very much developed in relation to the credit crunch.”

All these shows taken together could seem depressing, but they certainly can’t be accused of being out of step with the times, and timeliness equals profitability. When Hayley Taylor created a North American version of her show The Fairy Jobmother, where she helps unemployed people find jobs, she chirped to Reuters that the timing was “absolutely perfect.” And unlike most modern scripted shows, viewers can go to these reality shows to get some direct engagement with current issues. Most scriptwriters haven’t noticed that, as CNN’s Paul R. La Monica wrote, “demand for storage and apartments is increasing even as rental rates go up.” But reality shows have noticed: Storage Wars, about what happens to people’s storage units after they don’t pay the rent, is on its way to becoming one of the defining shows of the new era.

There are a few scripted producers who have taken the hint and started to incorporate some of this material into their work. Michael Patrick King, who produced the boom-times show Sex and the City, has returned with 2 Broke Girls, which announces its intention in the title, though it’s been mocked for its inaccurate understanding of what it means to be poor. Two other recent comedies, The Middle and Raising Hope, focus on lower middle-class families that sometimes have to think carefully about their expenses. It may take a while, but the rest of the industry may start following reality TV’s lead in dealing with the bad financial situation. If economic forecasts are right, they’ll have plenty of time to catch up.

Nobody Watches Anything

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 4 Comments

Here’s a reason why TV ratings have become more interesting in recent years: paradoxically, it’s because hardly anyone watches broadcast TV any more by comparison with previous eras. Television audiences are still large overall, and a major event (usually sports) can still pull in an old-fashioned mass audience, but cable has been chipping away at broadcast viewership since at least the ’80s, along with all the other things (VCRs, DVRs, the internet, more competitive networks). Whether the smaller audience have improved the quality of broadcast TV is another question (unlike cable programming, which obviously did improve since the early ’90s); probably it’s allowed some shows to survive that would once have been marginal, but it’s more likely that the standard for what constitutes marginal ratings have simply changed, and what was getting 9 million viewers in 1994 would be getting something like a third of that today. But the increasingly competitive world of TV and the famous fragmentation of the audience has made ratings more fun to follow. Instead of every show, even the failures, getting unimaginably huge numbers, we’re down to a point where the failures get amusingly low numbers – and we may soon reach the point where some broadcast shows get overall audiences that would be low by cable standards.

And because the overall numbers are low, that focuses attention more on demographics, analyzing what the ratings really mean when you look at a show’s performance with young viewers. It was supposedly ABC, the perennial third-place network in the ’60s, that really pushed the idea of focusing on the 18-49 demographic, and they did it because they couldn’t yet compete with NBC and CBS in terms of overall viewers. While it can’t be fun for a show’s producers to hear that certain viewers don’t count (and not only older viewers: Glee‘s ratings would probably look better if kids and teens counted in the Demo), it does make it more interesting to analyze: there are more ways for a TV show to succeed than just pulling in some gigantic number of viewers. The focus on the 18-49 demo may not be the best thing for broadcast, as networks have started to notice – though it’s doubtful that advertisers will snap up the network executives’ ideas for commercials aimed at older people. But there’s not much doubt that the list of top shows in the 18-49 bracket is a bit more varied than the list of top shows overall.

So while, like I said before, my own interest in ratings has gone down this season (and it’s not out of the question that DVR and online numbers could eventually be more fully incorporated into overall ratings, thus increasing viewership numbers again), I think the overall interest in these numbers is going to keep going up as the broadcast audiences keep getting smaller. It’s somehow more fun to watch networks fight over a shrinking pie, and argue about which one “really” has the biggest piece.

Of course, last night the real interest on TV, despite the strong ABC lineup (Suburgatory and Revenge are among the few new shows that are showing promise), was baseball: watching it on TV, following it on the internet, wherever. Sports are still the biggest events on television.

Badlands humour

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Teletoon

The U.S. is full of Canadian comedy writers, but they usually don’t get to make many jokes about their native country. That’s where Crash Canyon comes in. The new animated series on Teletoon was developed by a Calgarian writer for The Simpsons, Joel H. Cohen, who hired several other Canadian writers, including Simpsons colleague Tim Long and How I Met Your Mother’s Chuck Tatham.

Though shows like The Simpsons and HIMYM frequently have Canadian jokes, they’re usually obvious ones about Tim Hortons and hockey. On Crash Canyon, a mix of Family Guy and Gilligan’s Island about a Canadian family stuck in a canyon in Alberta, Cohen told Maclean’s that the writers finally had the opportunity to put in Canadian insider jokes like an ice cream store called “Don and Cherry’s” and a Monopoly game called “Moncton-opoly.” There are other possibly lost-on-Americans jokes, such as a stylist character who calls himself “the René to her Céline” and a road sign that says, “Now entering Saskatchewan—Welcome to our Nothing.”

“Americans love to make fun of Canada, so this is a chance to show another thing Canadians do better than the U.S.,” Cohen says. “In that sense, I guess we’re being patriotic. Now where do I pick up my Order of Canada medal?” Of course, not all the Canadian references are for insiders; Teletoon’s advance trailer includes a joke where the family daughter mixes up Anne Frank with Anne of Green Gables.

Can sci-fi be saved?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 2 Comments

Brook Rushton/FOX; ABC/Getty; Archive Photos/Getty; USA Cable Entertainment LLC/Keystone

Seeing the kind of publicity buildup Fox is giving to Terra Nova (premiering Sept. 26 on CityTV), you might think it was the last hope for science fiction on network television—and maybe it is. The show is about a family from a dystopian future that escapes to a prehistoric past, complete with CGI dinosaur fights and hints about hidden conspiracies. The network has high hopes for it: Landon Liboiron (Degrassi), who plays a rebellious teenage son, told Maclean’s the network has made the publicity into “a huge thing.” There’s a special sense of urgency surrounding both this show and the same network’s Alcatraz, from J.J. Abrams (Lost) about mysteriously ageless prison escapees. Every season there’s a science fiction show from a broadcast network that is supposed to be a big hit like Lost, or the drama that made Fox’s reputation, The X-Files, but it’s been years since any of them worked. If audiences reject this year’s sci-fi shows, it might be taken as a sign that no matter how much money a network spends, sci-fi isn’t mainstream anymore.

In the last few years, sci-fi movies like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Avatar have been big hits. But television has been another story. “It’s really bizarre,” says Jeff Pinkner, a showrunner on Abrams’s Fringe (in which an FBI-led team investigates unexplained phenomena), “People really want to accept it in a movie theatre, but on television, they’re like, I don’t know.” Ajay Fry, who covers science fiction as one of the hosts of Space’s InnerSPACE show, thinks the networks have been “too focused on trying to create something ‘like’ Lost or ‘like’ Battlestar Galactica,” and the result has been a lot of expensive, highly hyped failures. Some of those failures were original creations like last season’s The Event, a wildly promoted drama about a huge mystery involving aliens. Others attempted to recreate the days when sci-fi was popular: ABC spent two seasons trying to get an audience for a new version of V, the ’80s invasion allegory. One long-running sci-fi show after another has retired with nothing much to replace it; the CW network’s Supernatural is the only remnant of the youth-oriented genre shows that were popular in the ’00s.

On cable, things brightened up this summer with Falling Skies, where ER’s Noah Wylie leads a resistance movement against alien oppressors. But other cable networks are cutting back on the genre: the Syfy network has introduced the dramas Warehouse 13 and Alphas, but also some inexpensive reality shows. And on highbrow cable networks, viewers seem more willing to accept fantasy shows than sci-fi. Game of Thrones and True Blood are two of the most popular shows on HBO, a network that does not program sci-fi. Ron Moore, creator of the revamped Battlestar Galactica, once told Entertainment Weekly that high-end audiences avoided his show because of the subject matter. “Science fiction sort of has a rap,” Pinkner adds. “We’re running against that as far as viewership goes.” Magic and vampires are in; alien conspiracies and futuristic devices are a harder sell.

Continue…

Why old people are suddenly watchable on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Robert Voets/CBS via Getty Images

When Ted Danson was chosen as the new lead on CSI, the surprising thing wasn’t that a comedy actor (Cheers) was going to star in TV’s most famous gory forensic mystery. What stunned people was that a major U.S. show will have a hero who’s over 60. Danson, who was born in 1947 and has been bald since his sitcom days, had been playing character parts on shows like HBO’s Bored to Death. That’s what older actors usually do in television, where advertisers care mostly about reaching young viewers. But Bill Newcott, entertainment editor for the American Association of Retired Persons magazine, told Maclean’s there’s an increased awareness that “the longer the star has been out there, the more comfortable we are with them.” Older people are in.

Mark Harmon, who will turn 60 this year, is the star of the most-watched show on television, NCIS. Larry David is 64 and getting some of his best ratings on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And the recently announced Emmy nominees included 63-year-old Kathy Bates, whose Harry’s Law was one of the few successful new shows last season, and Betty White, who now specializes in jokes about her advanced age.

What’s causing this influx of people who are 60 and up? It may help that reality TV, which always seems to influence its scripted cousin, has been proving that you don’t need youth to get young people watching. American Idol has almost matched the success of the Simon Cowell years thanks to Steven Tyler, a man in his 60s who gets flirty with young contestants; he has completely overshadowed Jennifer Lopez, who is 20 years younger but much less popular with her own age cohort.

Continue…

The Ashton Kutcher phenomenon

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

CBS; FOX; Keystone Press; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

When CBS announced that Two and a Half Men had signed Ashton Kutcher to replace Charlie Sheen, the executives were probably hoping it would be a unique piece of news: a young movie star, who had just made a successful film with Natalie Portman (No Strings Attached), coming back to television. But it simply became part of a larger story about the new fall season. Instead of the usual tactic of snapping up aging movie stars—like William H. Macy on Shameless, or Glenn Close on Damages—the new U.S. shows for the fall season are full of feature-film actors in their twenties or early thirties. Actors normally graduate from television to movies, but many young actors this year seem to be realizing that, as Variety TV columnist Brian Lowry puts it, “TV can be extremely helpful to an actor’s career, and quite lucrative in its own right.”

And so when Canadian networks fought over who would get to simulcast other new U.S. shows this fall, they were fighting over shows starring these young movie people. Citytv snapped up 2 Broke Girls (which CBS executive Nina Tassler touted as her “highest-testing pilot ever”) with Kat Dennings from the summer blockbuster Thor. The same network took The New Girl (touted by its own production company as one of its “highest-testing pilots ever”), in which Zooey Deschanel will go from playing adorably quirky movie characters looking for love to playing an adorably quirky TV character looking for love. CTV got the ’60s period drama Pan Am, one of several attempts to copy Mad Men (even though Mad Men doesn’t get many viewers); it will star Christina Ricci of The Addams Family fame.

It’s no surprise that television networks want to get movie stars to headline their shows. Though there has been a lot of talk about TV being better or more prestigious than movies (“TV is replacing movies as elite entertainment,” wrote critic Edward Jay Epstein last season), no one really seems to act like they believe it: “On the food chain of entertainment,” wrote sitcom writer and blogger Ken Levine, “it goes like this: movies, television, street performing, radio. Movies look down at television. Television looks up at movies with awe.” When Sheen was fired from his show, TV Guide said that the producers felt the only possible replacement would be someone bigger than a mere television star: “They were going after movie stars,” an anonymous insider told the magazine’s Michael Schneider.

Continue…

Intelligent viewers have spoken

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

Franco Bellomo/WGBH

In an era of moribund network ratings, PBS’s Sunday stalwart Masterpiece has done the impossible, becoming TV’s standout program, with a 44 per cent increase in ratings. And the show accomplished it not by dumbing down or skimping on content but by doing the opposite: churning out more and more intelligent, sophisticated series. Everyone in the industry gives credit to one person: its executive producer Rebecca Eaton, 63, who’s had the job for 25 years. But the show wasn’t always flying high. Three years ago, it was floundering, a “dusty jewel,” Eaton recalls. The home of classics such as Traffik and The Jewel in the Crown looked and felt dated. Though it was showing acclaimed dramas such as Bleak House, viewers labelled it their “grandparents’ TV.” Making matters worse was a scheduling schizophrenia: a Brontë period drama would be followed by a contemporary thriller like Prime Suspect and then a Hercule Poirot cozy mystery.

Eaton gambled on a down-to-the-studs renovation. She wiped the fuddy-duddy name “Theatre” from the title. To cure the “head snap” scheduling problem, she divided the show into three seasons: contemporary dramas in the fall, classic fare in the winter, and mysteries in the summer. Each section got a distinct new look and a talented actor as a host. Acerbic Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) eagerly snapped up the Mystery! gig. “I think the whole notion of being a host announcing a drama that is about to unfold is a very rare thing these days, and it just really appealed to me,” he explained.

Ratings increased steadily before soaring this past year—its 40th on air—as Masterpiece pumped out hit after hit, including the acclaimed Sherlock, a new Upstairs Downstairs and the blockbuster Downton Abbey. The latter attracted 12.6 million viewers, with another one million watching it online. The drama about an aristocratic family and its servants was a hit in the prime early 20s age group, a market the show doesn’t target.

Continue…

Review: Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Shapiro wants to prove that U.S. television episodes are “pieces of small-scale, insidiously brilliant leftist propaganda.” And he sort of succeeds. The pundit, who claims his attempts to break into TV scriptwriting were scuttled because “outspoken conservatives are less likely to get jobs,” has set out to expose the liberal biases in our favourite TV shows past and present. CSI episodes “target conservatives in pathetically blatant ways.” Mary Tyler Moore insidiously told us that “if you liked Mary, you had to accept her active sex life.” Even Cops is liberal because it goes out of its way to find white criminals. And don’t get him started on Sesame Street, which promotes “politically correct multiculturalism.” If young people tend to be more liberal than their elders, Primetime Propaganda says it’s because their TV programs are indoctrinating them.

What makes the book easier to take than most political screeds about TV, left or right, is that Shapiro has bothered to go out and talk to some of the writers of these shows, who were happy to tell him that their political views did indeed influence what they wrote. Readers might not share Shapiro’s displeasure when the creator of The Waltons, which Shapiro finds unacceptably pro-New-Deal, tells the author, “I’m for abortion. I’m for gay marriage.” But at least writers like Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman are given a chance to argue that “it didn’t feel to us that we were preaching anything.”

Shapiro sees his book as an alternative to traditional conservative moralizing about TV: instead of arguing that people shouldn’t watch, he demands more employment for conservatives, possibly including himself: television producers can achieve greatness, he says, but “they can only do it with conservative help.” Still, he has trouble making the case that conservatives are systematically excluded. He even admits that Hollywood is friendly to Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and NCIS’s Don Bellisario, who are economic conservatives but “social liberals.” What Shapiro’s argument really comes down to is not that TV doesn’t hire conservatives, but that it doesn’t hire conservatives like him.