For all the upheaval and chatter about November sweeps and the fall TV season – from shows that “sucked,” in the words of NBC’s Jeff Zucker, to John Ritter’s death, from CBS ditching “The Reagans” to the profound indifference to “The Next Joe Millionaire,” from the disappearing young male viewer to how they do it in “The O.C.” – there is this:
Not a lot has changed.
CBS ended the sweeps period Wednesday night with the lead in total viewers, albeit by a larger margin than usual. NBC still led among its target demographic of adults 18-49, although not by much.
ABC was still preaching patience, FOX was still figuring out how to launch shows after the World Series, and UPN and The WB are still fighting for fifth place.
To be sure, there is a clear winner emerging from sweeps, and it’s CBS. The Eye has averaged close to 14.7 million viewers a night during the period, in which audience levels are used to set ad rates. That’s more than 3 million viewers better than second-place NBC (11.5 million) and CBS’ biggest win by that measure in more than two decades.
CBS is also the only network to improve its rating among adults 18-49 compared to last November; the others are down anywhere from 6 percent to 14 percent, according to Nielsen figures.
Other networks have questioned the validity of the Nielsen sample – particularly in the face of steep declines in ratings among young men – but Les Moonves, chairman and CEO of CBS, isn’t bothered.
“As people want to write those stories about everybody being down, we’re not down in any category,” he says. “We’re up in every single category, we’re even in 18- to 34-year-old men. So, we’re not losing them. We’re not complaining about Nielsen.”
NBC, which has made a little noise about how reliable the Nielsens are (or are not), still ended the sweep with the lead among adults 18-49. Through Tuesday, NBC was averaging a 4.5 rating in the demographic, slightly ahead of CBS’ 4.2, and the margin was expected to stay close to that through Wednesday night.
Zucker, president of entertainment at NBC, acknowledges his network’s decline so far this season. While he’s skeptical of Nielsen’s insistence that there’s no problem with its sampling method, he says the results have more to do with the very inexact science of guessing what an audience will like.
“The biggest lesson is that none of us knows for sure what’s absolutely going to work,” he says. “We go with our best estimates and our best hunches. Oftentimes, hits come from the fringes; I think we’ve seen that time and time again.”
The ways in which networks try to build hits differ from place to place. Moonves and ABC honchos Lloyd Braun and Susan Lyne believe in keeping shows in one place so viewers can always find them. Zucker doesn’t subscribe to that philosophy – NBC’s frequent schedule shuffling this season is evidence of that.
“The audience is incredibly savvy,” Zucker says. “They know where things are and how to smoke things out. We approach the schedule much in the way that I approached the “Today’ show when I was there as executive producer – you go with what’s hot at the time.”
Braun, having been burned by ABC’s over-scheduling of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” a few years ago, won’t take that route again.
“You don’t mess with viewing habits too much. If you believe in shows, keep them there,” says Braun, ABC’s chairman. “Let audiences find them, and do your best to continue to make them better. There might be some short-term gains in playing with a schedule. But it really is a marathon, both in terms of the season and in terms of any rebuilding of a network.”
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AP-NY-11-28-03 0617EST
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