The writer’s strike may have only been the beginning of what looks to be a momentous media change:
With the exception of Fox’s surprisingly strong “American Idol” finale on Wednesday, the May ratings have been pretty atrocious across the board, in a strike-shortened year that’s already shaping up as the TV executives’ annushorribilis.
The worst part is this may be no temporary hiccup. Increasingly, the shutdown and aftermath of the writers strike that ended in February is beginning to look like a signal moment in the slow, painful meltdown of the broadcast-TV industry.
Broadcasting, simply put, isn’t casting broadly anymore. As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of specialness. They’re becoming just the lowest numbers on the multichannel dial, rather than the last outposts of mass culture. It’s true that this evolution has been happening for years, but this year a tipping point was reached, a Rubicon crossed. Broadcast exceptionalism — its supposed immunity from the market forces afflicting all other media — is finally dead.
And that, fellow viewers, is a huge problem for those acronymic “legacy” networks. One, it undercuts executives’ argument to advertisers that broadcast still delivers the most bang for the buck of any media (negotiations for the sale of bulk ad time next TV season are taking place right now, an inconvenient moment to be sure from the networks’ standpoint). Also, the broadcasters’ economic model, as it currently stands, is simply unsustainable compared with that of their chief competitors, cable networks.
The days when most of America watched the same show and talked about it endlessly the next day are, for the most part gone. In 1953, 44 million Americans watched Lucy Ricardo go to the hospital and give birth. In 1957, 107 million Americans watched a live broadcast of Rogers & Hammerstein’s adaptation of Cinderella.
With the exception of Super Bowl telecasts, the closest any single program has come to those numbers in the last 25 years were the final episode of M*A*S*H (50 million households, 106 million viewers in 1983), the Who Shot J.R. ? episode of Dallas (41 million households in 1980), and the Cheers final episode (42 million households, 80 million viewers in 1993). Since then, the numbers for so-called “must-see” television episodes have fallen steadily.
We just don’t all watch the same thing anymore. And, that’s really not a bad thing.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Out of curiosity, how much of this can be attributed to DVR technology? I didn’t see anything in the article (though to be fair, I did only skim it), and as it continues to proliferate, networks will have to add those numbers in if they are not already doing so.