I’ve long been a big fan of the TV series Chuck. I’ve been frustrated with the creative direction of the show from time-to-time, but it’s always been fun to watch and the producers have generally been able to move the show forward in a satisfying direction.
But now Season Two has ended and NBC still has not announced whether they are going to renew the show or cancel it. It doesn’t get great ratings (although it’s not like NBC’s other shows are doing all that well either) and TV shows are ultimately concerned with profitability.
This is broadcast television, which is about mass audience. Chuck‘s ratings have always been modest (although I seem to recall that its ratings in the first part of its initial season were better, but then the Writer’s Guild strike shut down production). On cable, having a devoted audience of this size would be great; on broadcast, not so much.
There are a number of factors that drive the decision to keep a network show on the air. General buzz is sometimes helpful; it helps explain why Gossip Girl is still on. Prestige is another reason; winning Emmys helps, at least for a while. If the network owns the show, you might keep a show on the air to hit the magic number of 100 episodes, so you can then syndicate the series. DVD sales might also factor in. But it generally comes down to advertising. You want a big audience, or the right kind of audience, to sell advertising for the right kind of rates.
This TV Week article explains that even in the TiVo era, the initial real-time airing of an episode “remains critical to its long-term success.”
Here’s the dirty little secret of upfront season: The loudest voices in the room at scheduling meetings are often those from the sales department. If advertisers are clamoring for more comedies or fewer reality shows, the plaintive wails of development executives will be ignored so that a network can maximize its potential fourth-quarter revenue.
Chuck‘s fans have been clamoring for its renewal and have been using social media to champion for that to happen. This Observer article covers some of the particulars and acknowledges that the campaigning probably won’t have much of an impact. But it also includes this odd quote:
“NBC doesn’t care how many subs you buy,” explained Josh Bernoff, a television analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. “They don’t care whether their advertisers are happy, they only care if they pay. They don’t care if people love Chuck, they only care if there are enough people to watch it.”
Of course networks care if their advertisers are happy, since that’s directly related to whether they’ll buy ad time. And if Chuck fans demonstrate they’re willing to buy Subway sandwiches to back up their devotion, that’s not nothing. It may not be enough, but companies like Subway will absolutely take that into account.
Industry buzz this week has suggested that the decision to renew Chuck has already been made, but is being held up by other network-studio issues. I hope that’s true, but I’m a little worried that the social media crowd will think they won a big victory. The fact is that there was an online campaign to drive viewership of Chuck‘s season finale and it barely made a dent. A viral video that draws one million views is a big deal, but a network show with one million viewers is a huge disaster. There’s a big difference between mass and niche audiences. Facebook has more than 200 million members, but Twitter (which comScore said had 9.3 million visitors in March) gets all the buzz.
If you just listened to Twitter or the blogosphere, you’d think Battlestar Galactica was the most significant show, but it’s American Idol that’s a huge hit. What the networks want is something like Lost, that can draw good ratings in addition to the street cred. Interestingly, Lost‘s passionate and tech-savvy core fans are watching the show heavily by DVR, which has turned out to be a problem for advertising.
It’s tough to geeks to find their needs satisfied by the entertainment industry. I guess you’ll just have to be satisfied with X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Which I haven’t seen.
And don’t intend to.
(Didn’t go see Watchmen either…)
Tags: Chuck, NBC, Save Chuck, social media
One Response
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The Pop View » “…the great masses of the plain people.” Says:
[...] I wrote here: A viral video that draws one million views is a big deal, but a network show with one million [...]