Gender in TV Ratings - In Conclusion...

6. In conclusion...

Listen, I hate unfounded blanket statements and generalizations as much as the next guy. But looking at the previous five posts, it's kind of hard not to see a couple of trends. Males 18-49 like comedy and action. Genre and comedy are the two best ways to get a male audience, and it seems to be supported across block after block after block of TV. Females 18-49 watch to get invested in characters, whether it's Meredith and Derek on Grey's Anatomy or their favorite celeb on Dancing with the Stars.

Of course, the percentages used in these posts are ratios, not raw numbers. A flop is still a flop even if it skews way off of the median (see Kings, Life on Mars, SDSU, etc.). But males are the scarcer gender, and hopefully this post has helped display why the nets keep going back to the genre well even when a lot of them fail. Because when they succeed, they bring something you just can't get on a procedural. Stuff like 24, Fringe, and Heroes, even as modest performers in the whole demo, still bring in more M18-49s than just about any crime drama on TV.

Here's the complete list, separated by day and network. I think in a lot of cases it's interesting to look at gender dynamics across entire evenings. For example, the kind of mish-mash of shows on CBS Sunday are all over the place. Fringe has a very different percentage than Idol even though the Idol lead-in is so huge and is no doubt helping Fringe. Will it skew even more male in fall '09? Is female-heavy Biggest Loser contributing to SVU being the most female-skewing procedural on TV? Enjoy.

Show	Date	W18-49	M18-49	%	male
In Motherhood	16-Apr	1.95	0.95	33%	male
Samantha Who?	16-Apr	2.1	0.95	31%	male
Ugly Betty	30-Apr	2.9	1.1	28%	male
Grey's		7.65	2.3	23%	male
PP		5.1	1.5	23%	male
Survivor		4.1	3.05	43%	male
CSI		4.3	3.05	41%	male
Eleventh	2-Apr	3	1.95	39%	male
Harper's		2.5	1.3	34%	male
Earl		2.35	2.05	47%	male
P&R		2.45	2.25	48%	male
Office		3.8	3.7	49%	male
Rock		3.25	3.05	48%	male
ER	2-Apr	8	4	33%	male
Southland		2.65	2.2	45%	male
Bones		2.9	1.6	36%	male
Hell's		3.5	2.55	42%	male
Smallville		1.1	1.5	58%	male
Supernatural		1.15	1.05	48%	male
Wife Swap		1.75	0.9	34%	male
Supernanny	17-Apr	2.15	0.95	31%	male
20/20	17-Apr	1.8	1.05	37%	male
Ghost Whisperer		2.95	1.4	32%	male
Flashpoint		2	1.05	34%	male
Numb3rs		2.15	1.4	39%	male
Howie Do It		1	0.75	43%	male
FNL	10-Apr	1.4	1	42%	male
Dateline (Fri.)		1.55	1.025	40%	male
Terminator:SCC	10-Apr	1.3	1.55	54%	male
Prison Break		1.15	0.9	44%	male
Dollhouse		1.25	1.1	47%	male
Chris		0.85	0.4	32%	male
Game		1.2	0.5	29%	male
AFHV		2.25	2.25	50%	male
EM:HE		3.35	2.1	39%	male
DH		6.3	3.15	33%	male
B&S		4.45	1.7	28%	male
60 Minutes		1.55	1.5	49%	male
Amazing Race		3.65	2.6	42%	male
Cold Case		2.65	1.6	38%	male
The Unit		2.15	1.85	46%	male
Dateline (Sun.)		1.1	0.925	46%	male
Kings	5-Apr	1.05	1.05	50%	male
Celebrity Apprentice		3.4	2.75	45%	male
King of the Hill		1.2	1.6	57%	male
Simpsons		2.45	3.5	59%	male
Sit Down, Shut Up		1.75	2.1	55%	male
Family Guy		2.65	4.15	61%	male
American Dad		1.9	2.95	61%	male
DWTS (Mon.)		6.2	2.433	28%	male
Surviving Suburbia		3.15	1.25	28%	male
Castle		2.6	1.45	36%	male
BBT		3.5	3.3	49%	male
HIMYM		3.9	3.5	47%	male
2.5 Men		5.1	4.7	48%	male
Rules		4.25	3.55	46%	male
CSI: Miami		3.85	2.7	41%	male
Chuck		2.35	2.4	51%	male
Heroes		2.95	3.05	51%	male
Medium		2.75	1.6	37%	male
House		5.15	4	44%	male
24		3.1	3.65	54%	male
Gossip Girl		1.5	0.45	23%	male
One Tree Hill		1.65	0.55	25%	male
According to Jim		1.2	0.725	38%	male
DWTS (Tues.)		4.6	1.9	29%	male
Cupid		2.15	1	32%	male
NCIS	7-Apr	4.2	3.05	42%	male
Mentalist	7-Apr	4.3	2.95	41%	male
WAT	7-Apr	3.3	2.05	38%	male
Biggest Loser		4.825	2.325	33%	male
SVU		5.15	2.55	33%	male
Idol		10.15	5.9	37%	male
Fringe		4.3	3.6	46%	male
Reaper		0.7	0.6	46%	male
90210		1.35	0.5	27%	male
Scrubs	22-Apr	2	1.8	47%	male
Ted	22-Apr	1.7	1.65	49%	male
Lost		4.2	3.85	48%	male
Life on Mars	1-Apr	2.25	1.8	44%	male
Unusuals		1.8	1.3	42%	male
Christine	8-Apr	2.4	1.75	42%	male
Gary	8-Apr	2.55	1.9	43%	male
C.Minds		3.95	2.85	42%	male
CSI:NY		3.75	2.6	41%	male
Life	8-Apr	1.3	1.25	49%	male
L&O		2.55	2.05	45%	male
Lie to Me		2.6	2.1	45%	male
Idol		9.35	6.05	39%	male
ANTM		2.8	0.85	23%	male

Gender in TV Ratings - Reality TV

5. As with serialized drama, reality TV can succeed with either gender, depending on what kind it is.

I'm leaving newsmagazines out of this mix because I think they're probably very story-dependent.

AFHV 50% male Celebrity Apprentice 45% male Howie Do It 43% male Survivor 43% male Hell's 42% male Amazing Race 42% male MEDIAN Idol (Wed.) 39% male EM:HE 39% male Idol (Tues.) 37% male Wife Swap 34% male Biggest Loser 33% male Supernanny 31% male DWTS (Tues.) 29% male DWTS (Mon.) 28% male ANTM 23% male

All right, I'm going to return to the sweeping stereotype I posited in previous sections: dudes watch TV for action and laughs. The stuff above the median provides that: either explicitly, with ridiculous videos/stunts as in AFHV and Howie, or in the cutthroat interactions and strategy that populate the above-median competitive reality shows. The game is the thing that takes center stage. But comedy is built to generate laughs, and genre is usually built to generate action. Reality isn't so specific, and like drama, it can succeed on other levels. Below that line, I think you hit a different kind of reality show, where it's less about a team or a competition or interplay and more about investing in the people involved, be it a performance or just through some way of making their lives better. I don't know, maybe I'm not making any sense, but I think there's a change in the type of show, and it comes right at that median line, but I'm having trouble articulating it.

Gender in TV Ratings - Comedies

4. TV's most successful comedy blocks all skew young and male (or very close to it).

Why do the likes of Old Christine, Gary, Scrubs, and Better Off Ted keep coming back despite rather tepid A18-49 numbers? Well, if males are the scarcer gender and thus the gender in demand, comedy is a good route to getting them. Consider this:

Family Guy	61%	male
American Dad	61%	male
Simpsons	59%	male
King of the Hill	57%	male
Sit Down, Shut Up	55%	male
Office	49%	male
Ted	49%	male
BBT	49%	male
30 Rock	48%	male
2.5 Men	48%	male
P&R	48%	male
Scrubs	47%	male
HIMYM	47%	male
Earl	47%	male
Rules	46%	male
Gary	43%	male
Christine	42%	male
MEDIAN
According to Jim	38%	male
In Motherhood	33%	male
Chris	32%	male
Samantha Who?	31%	male
The Game	29%	male
Surviving Suburbia	28%	male

Fox's animation block is the most male-skewing block on television, no questions asked. The CBS and NBC blocks are both in the upper 40s along with Scrubs/Ted on ABC, while CBS Wednesday is lower, but still, right at the gender median despite being pretty old-skewing overall. Even though some of these shows are fairly "soapy" (HIMYM, Scrubs, The Office coming to mind) they still bring in the males because the males seemingly want to laugh. Now look at the six shows on the bottom of this list. All axed, all incapable of tapping into any kind of male interest. Is that a necessity to launch a successful comedy? 6 of 6 shows below the median were canned, 14 of 17 above it renewed. Coincidence? Maybe that is what ABC's doing wrong on the comedy front, and maybe that male skew is what saved Scrubs/Ted, because you've got to start somewhere. Will the two-hour ABC Wednesday block this fall find interest from the gender that, frankly, is defining successful comedy these days? Would seem to me that they'll have to at least skew as male as Christine/Gary, but, to be continued...

Gender in TV Ratings - Procedural/Crime Dramas

3. Mythbuster: Procedurals/crime shows pretty much don't ever skew male. You can bank on right around a 60 female/40 male split.

It's a misconception that I see a lot - people assume that because there are dead bodies and men doing investigating that it's something that mostly macho men would be interested in. Not the case.

Life	49%	male
Southland	45%	male
Lie to Me	45%	male
L&O	45%	male
NCIS	42%	male
Unusuals	42%	male
C.Minds	42%	male
CSI	41%	male
CSI: Miami	41%	male
CSI:NY	41%	male
Mentalist	41%	male
Numb3rs	39%	male
Eleventh	39%	male
WAT	38%	male
Cold Case	38%	male
Castle	36%	male
Bones	36%	male
Flashpoint	34%	male
SVU	33%	male

There are some case-of-the-week shows in the serialized that would fit right in on this list, like House (44%), Life on Mars (44%), and Medium (37%), but I decided basically to just go with non-genre crime dramas. The consistency in this group is really staggering, and even among this group, there's some gray area on the edges. Castle and Bones are both pretty "shippy" and light as crime shows go. Southland's grittiness and Life's conspiracy serial storyline keep those shows on the high end of the male count. But for the most part, the variation won't be significant. With very few exceptions, a crime drama will fall within 5% of the 60 female / 40 male plateau. It's quite amazing that all three CSIs plus the big CBS stars on Tuesday and Wednesday are within one percentage point.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a huge procedural watcher. But here's the deal with procedurals, in terms of gender: they're going to give you a very predictable, very normal audience. The audience you get is very close to the average audience that watches primetime TV. Both in males and in females, you can rely on decent but not chart-topping. If you remember my M18-49 and W18-49 top 10 charts from the first post, there was very little crime presence. The top-rated M18-49 draws were CSI and NCIS, tied for 16th, and they were the only ones in the top 20. Among W18-49, SVU is on the list at 7th, but then only Mentalist at 16th and NCIS at 19th in the top 20. So there are ceilings when you greenlight procedurals, because it's unlikely that you'll do much better than CBS did with The Mentalist this year. There's certainly nothing wrong with being 16th/19th as NCIS is, but compared to shows like 24 (8th in M18-49) and Private Practice (9th in W18-49), which aren't exactly smash successes in the entire demo, you're not swinging for the fences.

Gender in TV Ratings - Serialized/Genre Dramas

2. Serialized dramas are a great way to target a gender.

I'm gonna go really broad here and say there are two types of serialized dramas, "action" and "relationship." Plenty of these shows have cases-of-the-week, but also more serial elements than your average crime effort, so bear with me. Both types of serials are capable of going way off that median 58 female/42 male breakdown.

Smallville	58%	male
Terminator:SCC	54%	male
24	54%	male
Heroes	51%	male
Chuck	51%	male
Kings	50%	male
Lost	48%	male
Supernatural	48%	male
Dollhouse	47%	male
The Unit	46%	male
Reaper	46%	male
Fringe	46%	male
Life on Mars	44%	male
Prison Break	44%	male
House	44%	male
MEDIAN
FNL	42%	male
Medium	37%	male
Harper's	34%	male
DH	33%	male
ER	33%	male
Ghost Whisperer	32%	male
Cupid	32%	male
B&S	28%	male
Ugly Betty	28%	male
90210	27%	male
One Tree Hill	25%	male
Grey's	23%	male
Gossip Girl	23%	male
PP	23%	male

The median show is 42% and I think that's also a good dividing point between "action" and "relationship." I think an interesting point here is that the line between these two types of serials gets blurrier as you get closer to the median. Life on Mars and Reaper had lots of relationship-type stuff (perhaps as ordered by their female-loving nets). Though a relationship drama at heart, the football element probably brings FNL's male number up. Certainly stuff like DH and Harper's Island have heavy mystery/horror elements to them, but anyone who watches them knows there's also plenty of soap.

So when CW head Dawn Ostroff says she wants her W18-34s and she orders stuff like Gossip Girl and 90210, and for all the flak she gets for the bad total viewer numbers on those shows, the point needs to be made - she's getting the audience she wants, and pretty much only that audience. Meanwhile, stuff like Smallville/Reaper is either deprioritized or axed for skewing a long way from her target.

The major point to be made here is this: the median is 42% male. There are very few shows on this list that are right around that number - only four within 3%, and a couple of those in House and Life on Mars are very much borderline procedural. Serials are good at targeting. 5 of the top 10 male-skewers were "action" serials. Six of the top 7 female-skewers were "relationship" serials. Tomorrow, we'll look at procedurals and you'll see a very different story.

Gender in TV Ratings

Buying advertising on television is a business, and business is about supply and demand. That's a big part of why adults 18-49 is what ad buyers want - because you can find out-of-demo people in droves just about anywhere and in any daypart. But even within that subset, there are other important distinctions, and I'm looking at a biggie this week - gender. What kinds of TV shows are the two sexes watching? Is one of them harder to reach on the whole, and thus in greater demand? Thanks to a great thread on PIFeedback, I've gotten my hands on some gender breakdowns. It's not an issue that gets very much play in TV ratings discussion, at least not in terms of hard numbers, but I think it's important to decisions, so I'm going to try to bring some tangible info into the picture.

I wrote the vast majority of this last night, but I decided that it was so massive that I'm going to do a separate post for each point. Here's the first and probably most important one:

1. Within adults 18-49, males are the harder gender to reach on primetime network TV, and it's not even close.

I looked at 90 shows total, including all the big-5 originals during the first week of May Sweeps '09 and a selection of shows from the previous few weeks that didn't air that week either due to preemption, unavailable stats, or wrapping up early. Out of those 90 shows, here are some stats. (And keep in mind all numbers from here on out are within the A18-49 demo, not within the whole viewership.)

• Ranking all these shows by male/female percentages, the median percentage is 58% female / 42% male.

• Of the 90 shows, only ten have more M18-49 than W18-49. Another two are exactly even.

• The shows at the very top of the list among male-skewing shows are 61% male / 39% female. On the flip side, 37 of 90 shows are watched by at least 61% females. 12 of 90 shows are seen by at least 70% females!

The next four posts will be about different types of shows - serialized drama, procedurals, comedy, and reality. Then I'll do a final post with a wrap-up and a complete list of all the shows I looked at. For a preview, here are lists of the top 10 M18-49 and W18-49 performers during the first week of May sweeps 2009. This should at least begin to illustrate that different shows skew different ways gender-wise, because these lists have only four shows in common! Much more to come.

	Show	M18-49
1	Idol (Wed.)	6.05
2	Idol (Tues.)	5.9
3	2.5 Men	4.7
4	Family Guy	4.15
5	House	4
6	Lost	3.85
7	Office	3.7
8	24	3.65
9	Fringe	3.6
10	Rules	3.55

	Show	W18-49
1	Idol (Tues.)	10.15
2	Idol (Wed.)	9.35
3	Grey's	7.6
4	D.Housewives	6.3
5	DWTS (Mon.)	6.2
6	House	5.15
7	SVU	5.15
8	2.5 Men	5.1
9	P.Practice	5.1
10	Biggest Loser	4.825

The fine print on my somewhat flawed process: all numbers are derived from the "Ratings Info for PIFC" thread on PIFeedback, posted by exmalibu. For shows that ran over the hour, I did not take into account the extra or missing minute(s) - I simply averaged every 13 or 14 or 15 minute period that was available without weighting them. Generally, they should still be very close, but just trying to protect myself in case I run into an even bigger numbers geek than myself. Most breakdowns come from the first week of May sweeps 2009, which is April 23-29, and exceptions will be noted in the complete list of shows in the last post. When coming up with percentages, I'm also going on the assumption that there are the same number of males and females aged 18-49 in this country. Again, as with the 15-minute breakdowns, this won't be exactly right (some census info I looked at indicated it was about 51 female / 49 male) but close enough to not make it worth the hassle of coming up with a better calculation.