Bored with the fall TV season? Tired of matching wits with Jeopardy contestants? Take a crack at these brainteasers:
ABC's Twin Peaks, in its new Saturday-night time slot, is languishing in 75th place in the ratings for the season to date, averaging a paltry 16% share of the viewing audience. Yet ABC's chief of programming hails the show as "a great ratings success." Why?
Fox's hit The Simpsons is battling NBC's The Cosby Show in a head-to-head matchup on Thursday nights. But no one can quite agree on who is winning. The Cos trounces Bart's clan each week in the Nielsens, but Simpsons boosters claim their show is the real winner. Who's right?
Cop Rock, the fall's most ballyhooed experiment, has sunk to near the bottom of the ratings pack. ABC has considered trying it in a new time period, perhaps switching it with Gabriel's Fire, another new series doing poorly. But both shows have been left in place for now. How come?
The answers go to the heart of the tidal change that is transforming network television. Old verities, like the Nielsen ratings, are no longer holy writ. Shows that a few years ago would have been canceled are today being acclaimed as hits. Programmers who once juggled schedules at the drop of a Nielsen decimal point are now making those moves warily. And everybody is wondering whether television's mass audience -- those huge blocs of viewers who used to assemble in front of the set for shows like I Love Lucy and All in the Family and Roots -- has dispersed for good.
Sure, cable, independent stations and VCRs have been eating away at the network audience for much of the past decade. The remote-control device too has made viewers pickier: shows that don't grab their attention are zapped away in an instant. But the networks' woes have accelerated alarmingly this fall. Of the 22 shows introduced by ABC, CBS and NBC, not a single one is a bona fide hit. (The only new show that ranks in the Nielsen Top 30, America's Funniest People, is merely an appendage of an already established hit, America's Funniest Home Videos.) The three networks' combined share of the viewing audience -- more than 90% just a dozen years ago -- hit another air pocket this fall, dropping 4 percentage points from a year ago, to 66%. On Saturday nights, when TV viewership is at a low ebb, nearly half the audience is tuned in to something other than the Big Three.
| The economic slump is making matters worse. The ad market this fall has plummeted, with commercial time selling for an estimated 30% less than it fetched in the "upfront" buying last spring. As a result, the networks are making schedule changes only reluctantly. Reason: switching a show's time period forces the network to resell the commercial time -- and in the current depressed market, that could mean a substantial money loss, even if the ratings go up.