With no breakout hits, baseball has overshadowed the new TV season.
Five weeks in, the strange new television season has one obvious hit: Major League Baseball. And even its ratings aren’t everything they could be.
The star-crossed Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox helped boost TV attendance for postseason games. A World Series between the Florida Marlins and the New York Yankees just hasn’t had the same allure.
The World Series games on Fox are bringing in 17.7 million viewers (Saturday) to 20.9 million (Wednesday). Those numbers are quite a comedown from the 27.5 million who followed Game 7 of the American League championship between Boston and New York.
CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves says there’s no question that Fox’s competitors caught a break on the World Series. “With Chicago, the ratings would have been up 25 percent at least,” he says. “Boston would have raised it maybe not quite that much, but quite a lot.”
So far, baseball has overshadowed the new TV season. No breakout hit series has emerged, Fox’s “Joe Millionaire” has flopped in its premiere, and last-minute schedule changes have confused viewers.
“It’s been an unusual season dominated by two very unusual events,” says NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker. “First, the death of John Ritter and the impact it’s had on Tuesday. And obviously the resurrection of what was a dead sport: baseball. For the first time in many years, baseball was the ultimate reality show. You had great drama, two Cinderella stories, the Cubs and Red Sox.”
Every season is judged by the new series that become viewer favorites. At this point, the juiciest story is the show that tanked.
“The Next Joe Millionaire” attracted only 6.8 million viewers Monday, an amazing drop for a series that drew 18.6 million to the first edition’s premiere. The first show’s finale pulled in 40 million.
“There’s no question Monday night was a disappointment,” says Fox Entertainment President Gail Berman.
“Baseball has been an overwhelming success. We need to launch the rest of the programming to make an assessment of what will stick.”
Such Fox mainstays as “24,” “The Simpsons” and “Malcolm in the Middle” will return after baseball. Berman says she doesn’t know what went wrong Monday, but that Fox will stick with “Joe Millionaire” and air it twice a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays, over the next four weeks.
The show’s poor performance, after constant hype during postseason baseball, astonished the industry. The debacle suggests that the dating show’s premise – faux millionaire lies to gold-digging women – was something the audience would buy only once.
“We were very concerned about the potential of “Joe Millionaire’ on Tuesday,” says ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne. “We feel like we dodged a bullet there.”
The poor ratings for “Joe Millionaire” evidently hurt Fox’s “Skin,” which aired afterward and attracted only 6.3 million. Fox will try to build the audience for the provocative drama by airing it on other nights, and Berman points to the slow but steady growth of her network’s “The O.C.” as a model.
There have been other unpleasant surprises for programmers. Many formidable hits are down, notably “Friends,” “ER,” “Will & Grace,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “NYPD Blue.” No new series has established itself with the force of “CSI” or “American Idol.”
“There was no must-see show, no show that generated the buzz that “CSI: Miami’ did,” Lyne says of the CBS hit last season. “When there is a show like that, it lifts all ships. It brings people to TV.”
But several programs are solid performers in the 18-to-49 demo so dear to advertisers. NBC’s Zucker points to his own “Las Vegas” and to ABC’s “Hope & Faith,” starring Kelly Ripa.
CBS’ Moonves cites those series and “The O.C.” as successes. He says five of his six new series opened “extremely well”: “Two and a Half Men,” “Cold Case,” “Joan of Arcadia,” “Navy NCIS” and “The Handler.” He calls his remaining new series, “The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire,” a disappointment in a tough time slot.
CBS remains the most-watched network, ahead of Fox, NBC and ABC. Yet in the 18-to-49 demo, CBS places fourth, after Fox, NBC and ABC.
Moonves agrees that baseball “has thrown things a little out of whack” and that hurt CBS. But he predicts that once baseball is over, his network will soar.
“For CBS, it’s been a great fall,” Moonves says. “For ABC it’s a good fall. For Fox, the jury is still out. For NBC, I couldn’t say for them that they would say it’s a good fall.”
Zucker says it has been a mixed bag. “We’ve had a pretty good fall,” he says. “It’s been obscured by some high-profile disappointments: “Coupling’ and “Lyon’s Den.”‘
NBC has stabilized Tuesday with “Whoopi,” which Zucker says has performed “incredibly well in the face of John Ritter.” He defends the romantic comedy “Miss Match” on Friday as a success among 18-to-49 viewers, NBC’s core audience. But he says the network needs to shore up Friday nights and the 10 p.m. Sunday slot, where “Lyon’s Den” airs. The show “has to do better and get better,” Zucker says.
He has pulled “Coupling” from its cushy 9:30 Thursday slot between “Will & Grace” and “ER.” He hasn’t determined when it will return.
“It still needs a lot of development,” Zucker says of “Coupling.” “The characters are not developed. It’s too crude. It gets pulled for two reasons: It needs to be retooled, and I need the network to perform better.”
NBC yanked critics’ favorite “Boomtown,” which performed weakly on Fridays, but Zucker says the network hasn’t given up on the show.
“We still have six episodes in the can,” he says. “We’re trying to find a better time period.”
NBC’s numerous 11th-hour changes have voided some listings and confused viewers. Many readers called to ask what had happened to “The West Wing,” which NBC pulled last week rather than pit against the Cubs-Marlins finale. The episode aired this week against lesser competition from Game 4 of the Yankees-Marlins series. “It’s like a baseball manager making last-minute substitutions,” Zucker says. “The old rules don’t apply anymore. We’re working on a 52-week schedule.”
Such scheduling changes also can represent desperation. More changes are possible across the board as networks jockey to improve their performance in the November sweeps, the crucial ratings period that starts next week.
NBC, for instance, shifts “Third Watch” to Fridays starting next week and introduces the reality series “Average Joe” on Nov. 3. On Nov. 4, Zucker will toss a 90-minute “Fear Factor” against the first episode of ABC’s “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter” since Ritter’s death.
ABC’s Lyne says the episode, which is shooting, has “a wonderful script” that features guest stars James Garner and Suzanne Pleshette.
“We’ll have to wait and see what happens with “8 Simple Rules,”‘ Lyne says. “By and large, our Tuesday schedule is working extremely well.”
Lyne describes it as a confusing season so far. “There were many shows that I think we all thought were going to perform well, be it “Karen Sisco’ or “Miss Match’ or “Joe Millionaire,’ that have not been embraced the way we expected,” she says. “There are just as many shows the TV journalism community wrote off that are performing well.”
For examples, she lists her new sitcoms “I’m With Her,” “It’s All Relative” and “Married to the Kellys.” But “Karen Sisco” has been a disappointment, and Lyne says ABC is addressing viewer complaints that Karen is “not terribly emotive.”
“We don’t want to turn the show into something completely different,” Lyne says. “That character is great, but there are ways to make her more accessible.”
Otherwise, the surprises for Disney-owned ABC have been happy ones, with stronger lineups on most nights.
“It’s been as positive a start for the season as we could have hoped,” Lyne says. “There are very few time periods where we are not seriously competitive, and this is with a young stable of shows. There’s real growth potential on the schedule, even without a big new hit. Give these shows a season or two, and they’ll perform at a different level.”
At Fox, there are no complaints about the World Series ratings. “I think this is all gravy,” Berman says. “We have had fantastic championship series that were World Series-like in ratings. The baseball season has ended wonderfully for Fox.”
It’s just too soon to draw any conclusions about the rest of Fox’s schedule. The network traditionally performs weakly at year’s end, and it will likely pick up next year with the arrival of “American Idol.”
“We’re suffering from what our counterparts at other networks have dealt with,” Berman says. “It’s difficult to reach the young-adult audience. We’re experiencing a little later the pains they’ve gone through.”
In fact, the networks have been stunned by an 8 percent dip overall in the viewing by men ages 18 to 34. The decline is unprecedented, and there are no commensurate drops in other age groups, says David Poltrack, CBS’ executive vice president for research.
“That significant drop in men 18 to 34 is affecting everyone negatively,” Poltrack says. “It’s something no one can make any sense of.”
Nielsen Media Research has found that younger men, those 18 to 24, are watching more late-night television and less prime time. “What we see is a real viewing drop-off from the previous year,” Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus said.
That decline, the scheduling confusion and the lack of a major hit all hang over the TV industry. But NBC’s Zucker pooh-poohs any concerns about the state of broadcasting.
“People are wringing their hands,” he says. “It’s not as problematic as others would have you believe. There are disappointments, but there are one or two shows popping.”
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(c) 2003, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
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AP-NY-10-24-03 1232EDT
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