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TV just had its most-watched summer ever while the big four struggled
by Jason Hughes, posted Aug 27th 2009 9:02AM
What an interesting summer for television. In general, the claim that television viewing reached an all-time high this summer doesn't really surprise me. After all, we're in what the media tells us is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. That means more people out of work and less money for everybody.People out of work and unable to find work are going to be bored, so they're going to watch television. People with less money are going to stay home more often, so they're going to watch television. That part makes sense to me. The part that is a little surprising, but only a little, is that all of that record viewing went to the cable networks and not the big four.
There was not a single break-out summer success story on ABC, CBS, NBC or FOX. Every single show they put on the air either crashed and burned, or barely stayed afloat. But the story is so very different on cable. Week after week we got new stories about original series breaking records on almost every network.
Warehouse 13, when you consider DVR viewership, is the highest rated show in the history of Syfy/Sci Fi. Royal Pains is far and away the breakout hit of the summer averaging more than seven million viewers. In contrast, ABC's Defying Gravity never reached four million. Even summer staples like The Closer and Burn Notice drew impressive numbers.
While it's easy to argue that their 7 million viewers don't stack up to network numbers in the fall and winter, they do stack up this summer. More importantly, they represent 4-7 million viewers who could have been watching the networks, but chose not to. And cable got those numbers with programming with much, much lower budgets than the big four.
With the economic factors still in effect, we may be looking at big viewership as the regular season gets under way as well, and I'll expect ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX will reap the benefits of that the most. Partially because the cables are going to wrap their season and get out of the way. But how many more years will they do that?
Plus, you have to give cable credit where credit's due. If you figure there are three seasons of television, then CBS won last fall, FOX took the winter, and cable collectively owned the summer. They've proven they can hang with the big boys, even if it is during the big boys' off-season. And the big networks did throw new programming at us. We just weren't having any of it.
The television landscape is changing. I'm not sure what it's changing into, but the tides are coming. Is The Jay Leno Show experiment a sign of it? Is summer after summer of record-breaking ratings on cable another sign? Is Paula Abdul leaving American Idol a sign? At least one of those questions is, I'm pretty sure, completely unrelated to anything.
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