Spotted Ratings, Wednesday 8/3/11

WHAT MATTERS:

• The Wednesday boringness continues as So You Think You Can Dance (1.8) and America's Got Talent (2.4) both declined to Wednesday lows, Big Brother (2.5) won the evening and slightly increased from last week, and a primetime edition of Nightline (1.3) tied its best ratings of the summer. Newbie Love in the Wild (1.4) continues to follow Got Talent downward.

Above based on preliminary adults 18-49 ratings unless otherwise noted.

War of 18-49 Update, Survivor (Spring 2011)

Let's take a look at the spring 2011 season (the twenty-second overall) of Survivor on CBS.


Spring 2011 adults 18-49 low/average/high: 3.1/3.28/4.0

Rating the Ratings: Like The Amazing Race from my Monday post, Survivor was a pretty darn consistent show for a few years and then seemingly took a big step down in spring 2011. However, Survivor has a much more obvious excuse than does Race: it had to face American Idol regularly for the first time. Though the show continued to pull decent ratings and was affected less than other unscripted shows, the 16% year-to-year drop is still the show's biggest for a season since spring 2007. But what really suggests that drop is misleading is the finale number; the spike to a 4.0 was much larger than most Survivor finale spikes, and the 4.0 was down just two ticks (5%) from the year-ago finale. When placed a comparable competitive environment, this show wasn't as damaged as most of the raw numbers suggested. Grade: B-.

Here's the now updated War of 18-49 post for Survivor.

Spotted Ratings, Tuesday 8/2/11

WHAT MATTERS:

• The big news on this Tuesday was a decent premiere from ABC's Take the Money and Run (1.9), which held nearly all of the Wipeout lead-in (2.0) and was even with the June 21 premiere of previous timeslot occupant 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show. 101 Ways held up decently from there, so let's see if Take the Money follows suit.

• The drops continue on NBC, with It's Worth What? (1.2) and America's Got Talent (2.9) both hitting new Tuesday lows, while Fox's Hell's Kitchen (2.6) and MasterChef (2.4) remain solid.

Above based on preliminary adults 18-49 ratings unless otherwise noted.

True Strength: What is "Normal" Competition?

Now that we've put the 10:00 hour on something resembling a level playing field, I think we're far enough along that we can come up with a formula. But the other baseline we have to come up with is exactly what the "expected" competition is in a given timeslot. In order to be able to gauge whether the competition is "heavy" or "light," we need to know what "normal" is.

You can't figure out "normal" on a timeslot-by-timeslot basis, because maybe one timeslot is "heavy" the whole season and maybe another is "light" the whole season. We have to do a much bigger picture.

The War of 18-49, The Game

THE GAME (The CW/BET)

Scheduling history: In its first two seasons, The Game followed the other CDub comedies from Sunday to Monday and back again. Season three saw the CW essentially burn it (and Everybody Hates Chris) off on Friday. Then came a Tuesday timeslot on BET, which was where the ratings went through the roof. The last two BET seasons aired on Wednesday.

Spotted Ratings, Monday 8/1/11

WHAT MATTERS:

• ABC's The Bachelorette (2.7 for the finale, 2.8 for the "After the Final Rose" special) ended on a surprisingly off note, only up a bit week-to-week and down 29% from last year's finale. This was mostly a down year, but not that much, so consider this a particularly grim end. The show still dominated Monday's ratings, though. Spinoff Bachelor Pad begins season two next week.

• Hell's Kitchen (2.4) was down a little from last week while MasterChef (2.3) was down a tick from its last Monday original two weeks ago.

Above based on preliminary adults 18-49 ratings unless otherwise noted.

True Strength: 10:00 Shows as Competition

Before we come up with a "formula" for how much competition brings down TV ratings, we have to get a sense of what a "normal" level of competition is. And before we can do that, we have to get all competition on a level playing field. Now, I could approach this in a much more complicated way than I'm going to (more on that a little later), but in looking over the full season of competition or "Broadcast Persons Using TV" levels, there are two really obvious problems with using "bcPUT" as a level playing field stat:

1) The 10:00 hour. The basic problem here is that we don't have local programming numbers for Fox, at least not with any regularity. Fox is a big primetime presence in the other two hours but counts as a 0.0 in 10:00 "broadcast PUT" calculations. That makes the bcPUT look much smaller than it should be for 10:00 shows.

2) Sports. We've looked at this a bit in previous posts, but big sporting events are largely comprised of an audience that would not otherwise be watching something else in primetime. Many programs that air against big sporting events do not drop nearly as much as they do/would against entertainment programs of the same rating. In other words, when calculating competition or bcPUT, sports "count" too much.

War of 18-49 Update, The Amazing Race (Spring 2011)

Let's take a look at the spring 2011 season (the eighteenth overall) of The Amazing Race on CBS.


Spring 2011 adults 18-49 low/average/high: 2.1/2.64/3.2

Rating the Ratings: Since The Amazing Race moved to Sunday five years ago, there's been almost nothing in primetime more consistent ratings-wise. Until now. The Race took a significant drop from its usual low-3's level to a mid-2's average in spring 2011, down 16% from the year-ago spring season (not to mention 20% from the most recent fall season). As in the fall, the show got a boost from big lead-ins even when they meant weird start times (said overruns came in March due to the NCAA basketball tournament) but even those boosts weren't as big as the March Madness bump in March 2010. It was pretty much a negative double-digits season from wire to wire, perhaps the first chink in this program's armor since the move to Sunday. No season of the Race since 2006 has taken a year-to-year drop this big. Grade: D+.

Here's the now updated War of 18-49 post for The Amazing Race.

Spotted Ratings, Sunday 7/31/11

WHAT MATTERS:

• Only occasionally does ABC air part of a Bachelor or Bachelorette season on a different night from the regularly-scheduled one. The reason why: the ratings always suffer. And The Bachelorette's Sunday "The Men Tell All" episode (1.6) hit a season and series low. It was just the second trip ever below the 2.0 threshold for the Bachelor/ette franchise. In terms of reading anything into tonight's finale ratings? Probably doesn't mean much.

• Big Brother (2.8) tied a season high, though that number may change in the finals due to the ten-minute interruption for a President Obama speech. Lead-out Same Name (1.4) is also subject to change due to a ten-minute overrun but lost a tenth from last week preliminarily. (ABC and NBC joined their 8:00 repeat programming in progress at 8:50, meaning their originals' start times later in the evening were unaffected.)

• The Marriage Ref (0.9) continues its limp toward cancellation. It'll double up episodes starting next week.

Above based on preliminary adults 18-49 ratings unless otherwise noted.

July 2011 Cable Ratings Guide

I put one of these up in mid-June as a "Summer Cable Ratings Guide," but I think I'm going to make an effort to do one of these each month throughout the year. I'll shoot for the first Monday of each month. I'll reiterate that I primarily talk about adults 18-49 ratings below even though some of these networks may not particularly care about that demo. The main reason I use them anyway is because of accessibility, though it also helps put everything on an apples-to-apples basis.