The Question, Sunday 6/30/13: Can Dexter Keep Killing It in the Summer?

The flagship Showtime drama Dexter quietly had a sensational season in fall 2012, growing double-digits year-to-year pretty much from wire to wire. But with its lead-out Homeland skyrocketing even faster, Showtime has elected to separate the two. Homeland now has the fall responsibility, while Dexter moves to the summer for the first time and has to contend with smaller viewing levels and a much more potent competing drama on HBO in True Blood. Can Dexter keep killing it in the summer? That's The Question for Sunday, June 30, 2013.

Top 10 of the Last 10, Network Seasons

The collective decline in Live+SD ratings makes it hard to fairly compare numbers across seasons. But with the A18-49+ stat, we have the technology! Enter the "Top 10 of the Last 10" lists, which will line up the last ten seasons (2003-04 thru 2012-13) and give us an idea of which shows were strongest after we set the collective decline off to the side. (I'll throw in the raw numbers too, to give a sense of how far ratings have fallen.)

This week, it's a look at networks as a whole, comparing their seasons using only the average of their original non-sports series. Unless you are really interested in Fox, most of this will be pretty boring, but I figured it was worth getting out there!

War of 18-49 Update, Family Guy (2012-13)

Let's take a look at the 2012-13 season (the twelfth overall) of Family Guy on Fox.

Accountability Week, First Two Weeks

This is part two of a look-back on all the predictions made over the course of the 2012-13 season. I will save the planned third part, looking at the best and worst The Question lines, for the end of the summer and include the summer lines in that. (Alternate explanation: I ran out of time in my pre-vacation work-ahead. You decide!) This time, we'll look at my predictions on the posts detailing the First Two Weeks of new shows.

The War of 18-49, Archer

ARCHER (FX/FXX)

Scheduling history: Archer aired its first four seasons on Thursday at 10/9c, with two exceptions: a special sneak preview in September 2009 before the show's official premiere, and a three episode run at 10:30 in fall 2011. It moved to Monday for season five but returned to Thursday in season six.

See (who saw) how it all began: FX first previewed Archer about four months before the official premiere after It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia on 9/17/09, in an oddly promoted airing that didn't give away the name of the show (or really anything about it). That got 0.91 million viewers and a 0.5 demo and is not included in the season one average below. Then its official premiere on 1/14/10 about doubled that audience, scoring 1.82 million viewers and a 0.9. And a repeat of the preview at 10:30 had a 0.7. It dropped fast from there, to 0.7 in week two, 0.5 in week three, 0.4 in week four and 0.3 in week five! But after that it finally steadied, getting back to a 0.4 for most of the rest of the season and even perking up to a 0.6 for the season's penultimate episode.

The best of times: In seasons two through four, not only was Archer growing every year, but it was growing faster every year. In season four, it finally became a legitimately strong program in 18-49, breaking through with its first ever 1.0 for the 1/17/13 premiere and hitting a 1.1 three times later in the season.

The worst of times: After a seemingly ill-advised move to Monday in 2014, Archer finally sniffed at its season one ratings again, hitting a couple 0.4's in the second half of the season. It had a couple more 0.4's in the return to Thursday for season six, but the 0.3 in the series' fifth week remained a series low out of the entire FX run. It finally dipped into the 0.2's in its first FXX season in 2017.

Then vs. now: Most of the truly legit comedies on broadcast don't peak right out of the gate, and FX has recognized that. Both of their biggest comedy hits Archer and It's Always Sunny have blossomed after several years of tiny ratings. These shows have always skewed extremely young, so there's probably been some value in them even at their lower levels. But now, FX has built a really strong property, and they don't want to let it go; therefore, it wasn't initially announced as one of the comedies bound for 18-34-centric FXX. If it were all about maximizing 18-34, Archer would certainly be FXX-bound. But clearly the mothership network wanted to keep one of the hottest draws in that demo for itself. However, as the franchise has softened a bit in the last couple seasons, FX finally did announce that Archer would head for FXX. That happened in 2017.

Adults 18-49 info by season:

Seas	Year	Slot	Avg	y2y	Lo	Hi	Results	Grade
1	Winter 2010	Thursday 10:00	0.53		0.3	0.9	detail
2	Winter 2011		Thursday 10:00	0.55	+3%	0.4	0.7		detail
3	2011-12		Thursday 10:00	0.68	+24%	0.5	0.8		detail
4	Winter 2013		Thursday 10:00	0.93	+37%	0.7	1.1		detail
5	Winter 2014	Monday 10:00	0.61	-34%	0.4	1.0	detail	D+
6	Winter 2015	Thursday 10:00	0.55	-11%	0.4	0.8	detail	B
7	Spring 2016		Thursday 10:00	0.40	-26%	0.3	0.5	detail	C
8	Spring 2017	Wednesday 10:00	0.26	-36%	0.2	0.4	detail	C+
9	Spring 2018		Wednesday 10:00	0.18	-29%	0.1	0.3	detail
10	Summer 2019		Wednesday 10:00	0.13	-27%	0.1	0.2	detail

Historical-adjusted ratings by season:

Seas	Year	A18-49+	Label	Now19	y2y	Lo	Hi	Premiere	Finale
1	Winter 2010	19				10.66	32	32	14
2	Winter 2011	21				15.73	28	28	20
3	2011-12	29				23.17	34	30	33
4	Winter 2013	44				34.41	53	48	51
5	Winter 2014	33				21.87	54	54	22
6	Winter 2015	33				24.38	46	46	28
7	Spring 2016	28				23.35	37	37	26
8	Spring 2017	21				13.88	33	33	19
9	Spring 2018	17				12.78	26	26	14
10	Summer 2019	14				9.47	21	21	14
AVERAGE:		AVERAGE:	26

The War of 18-49 chronicles the ratings history of veteran primetime series. For more, see the Index.

The Question, Wednesday 6/26/13: Will Big Brother Get Bigger?

Tonight CBS enters phase two of its turning on of the summer lights with its three-night spectacular Big Brother. Last season finally snapped Big Brother's improbable growth streak, though at least some of the blame probably belongs with the Summer Olympics derailing the show's early weeks. There's no such excuse this year, though it does get to deal with Fox's potent MasterChef in the Wednesday 8:00 hour. Will Big Brother get bigger? That's The Question for Wednesday, June 26, 2013.

War of 18-49 Update, Parks and Recreation (2012-13)

Let's take a look at the 2012-13 season (the sixth overall) of Parks and Recreation on NBC.

Accountability Week, Best Case/Worst Case

My goal for the 2012-13 season was to get much more heavily into the prediction business. I think the last evolution of ratings analysis is comparing the numbers with the expectation, and I don't want to be afraid of becoming the guy that can generate the most expert expectations.

So this week, I've got a couple posts looking back on the predictions. This is all probably not very good for my credibility, but I'm hoping that holding myself to these numbers will both motivate me to improve as well as give me some pointers on how to improve.

We'll start with all the many Best Case/Worst Case predictions generated over the course of the season. I tried to weed out burn-off numbers that would've deflated the averages, though I may not have gotten all of them. I'll start with some highlights and lowlights of the BC/WC seasons, and then I'll look at some of the larger statistics.

War of 18-49 Flashback, Better Off Ted (ABC, 2009-10)

BETTER OFF TED (ABC)

Scheduling history: Better Off Ted aired on Wednesday alongside NBC import Scrubs for its first run of episodes in spring 2009. ABC then renewed the show but unloaded the rest of the season one order during the summer of 2009, most of it after low-rated summer offering The Superstars. It returned to the pairing with Scrubs at the end of fall 2009, this time on Tuesday.

The Question, Monday 6/24/13: Will Ratings Go Over Or Under... the Dome?

Of all the broadcast networks' scripted offerings this summer, it's Stephen King-inspired Under the Dome that's gotten the most hype. If any of them work, it should be this one. CBS' promotion has been crazy by summer series standards, including a teaser during the Super Bowl in early February! Tonight it premieres after an hour of The Big Bang Theory, TV's best repeater, and it doesn't seem that unreasonable to expect it to grow on that audience.

Over/Under: 2.05.