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According to a report from AdAge, every single network drama that aired on Tuesday night experienced a double-digit decline in ratings. And aside from a decent showing from The Muppets, the report relays that there have been few bright spots to the start of this year's fall TV lineup.
[...] All told, cumulative viewership during "Premiere Week", as it's called, is down 8% compared to the same period a year-ago. More worrisome for TV networks is that viewership from the highly sought-after 18-24 demographic is down 20% year over year, with male viewership within that demographic falling by 24%.
Males in the 18-24 demographic are the most coveted in advertising because that's when studies show brand preferences are formed. 24% is a catastrophic decline for TV.
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Sunday September 27 2015, @01:44PM
Males in the 18-24 demographic are the most coveted in advertising
OK lets look at the lineup. Google tuesday TV schedule. I don't watch TV (too young) so I had to look it up.
ABC leads off with "the muppets" which was cool for about a year in their grandpa's generation, when Dad was a kid. Its like leading off in the 80s with Lawrence Whelk and being surprised the kids aren't tuning in. They actually call it a "mockumentary style" which appeals to about 5% of the snarky reddit demographic for about two months. It'll be gone and forgotten by thanksgiving. I'll wait for the nostalgia hit from Mr Belvedere and 227 and the love boat rather than the Fing muppets.
CBS leads off with weirdo Fox News paranoia cop worship shows. This is a narrowcasting genre which will slowly die off season after season, while the average viewer ages about one year per year. I'd bet no one under 40 watches this stuff, its not a sequel but continuously on since the 90s.
CW can just rename itself to the "WTF" network.
FOX has "Life changes for a womanizing bachelor who learns that he fathered a son who in turn has a daughter of his own." which is probably supposed to be a shitcom but to a 20 year old male that sounds more like a horror movie. Followed by a show called "grinder" which to 20 year old makes means "grindr" even though it has nothing to do with grindr, uh, probably. Its like having a show named 2G1C or goatse.cx that is actually a cooking show. I'm sure the out of touch 60 year old baby boomers who run the network don't even know what grindr is.
NBC has a wanna be american idol for women and flamboyantly out young men (not that there's anything wrong with that). Its not going to sell well to "majority 18-24 males". They'd get better young male viewing numbers by trying to telemarket a home castration kit.
It clearly isn't the most coveted ad segment because NOTHING they're offering would appeal to an 18-24 stereotypical male. Tuesday night is completely emasculated and aimed at old people, old women, and to a much lesser extent, gay men.
If they wanted stereotypical 18-24 males they would have sports, extreme sports, adventure-type stuff, reality TV with hot young women, ultra soft pr0n like Baywatch... instead they ship emasculated crap and act surprised guys don't watch.
On the bright side, Tuesday is the worst TV schedule... Even Sunday appears better, at least during football season.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 27 2015, @01:53PM
I laughed my way through your post - good work!
Then I had the most ridiculous idea. Do you think that the left-leaning SJW agenda of the networks may finally spell their doom? Or, more likely, the networks are being secretly subsidized, so they don't really need the advertising money?
All seriousness aside, I'd like to hear more about your home castration kit.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2015, @02:16PM
What's this story about, TV ratings?
It's those TV executives trying to impose their SJW values on the rest of America, I tell you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2015, @02:42PM
I was about to make my own post titled "Crap" but you got the idea right. There's nothing but stinking crap coming out of Hollywood. BBC is coming out with a streaming service for the US soon, and I'll be getting that as I like their shows a helluva lot more than the steaming piles of gastrointestinal refuse coming from shittywood.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 28 2015, @12:11PM
Oh there's nothing financially wrong with selling to old people, flamboyantly gay men, and women, they as a collection probably outnumber 18-24 year old males by 10 to 1, the problem is the mythology that advertisers give a F about 18-24 yr old men. Maybe because of SJW stuff, but more likely because they never gave a F and its a mythology from the boomer era in the 70s or whatever "we love you young boomers, we love you so much and you're our only important customers, now buy our stuff because we love you youthful people" and it sounds so appealing that people have been falling for it ever since.
I mean seriously, such manure spread about brand indoctrination... if the average consumer life of a human is a half century and the average life of a brand is like five years...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Sunday September 27 2015, @03:15PM
UK TV isn't much better.
For years now I've just cherry-picked the best and honestly waited unless everyone is still talking about a series years later before I even trial it. Seriously, I've only just picked up House and started watching that, and yet I've watched Hugh Laurie on English TV since I was a kid. It's just all so shit that until something had its entire run and you can go back and trial a handful of random episode (my minimum is 2, if I don't like it after 2, I'll probably never like it). Then I tend to buy the whole thing - or at the very least series by series until it deteriorates - on DVD / streaming services that don't have ads (I like Google Play and Amazon Prime Instant Video).
The random brainless stuff? I only watch when I need random brainless - I wouldn't *PAY* for it.
I'm waiting for the days that when you like a series, you can just buy it direct from the people who make it. No fuss, one click, purchase, done. No ads, no networks, no waiting for it to arrive in your area, no waiting for the big channels or distributors to pick it up.
Same with movies.
TV's dead. Scheduled TV is definitely dead. My TV is literally nothing more than a display device, I bought it to be so and not to be tied to types of content or methods of delivery. I'm just as likely to ChromeCast an episode from Amazon or Google as I am dig out something from the DVD shelf.
In its dying throes it might throw us a bone or two, but my cable connection is the prime source of entertainment not because of the set-top-box on the end (which comes for free with the connection) but for the Internet bandwidth it provides. And I do it all legitimately. If you're going to invent stupid rules, I'm not going to break the law to get around them, I'll just not consume your content - it's so much easier and cheaper and I already have been through the period where I couldn't afford to watch anything for years anyway, so I don't feel I've missed out if there's a series I've never heard of or similar.
The day my streaming is more difficult or annoying than necessary, I stop doing it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 28 2015, @12:04PM
Scheduled TV is definitely dead.
My kids cry when we watch something live and
1) it has ads, which the streaming services do not, and "shared" media has ads stripped out.
2) I can't skip the ads like on the legacy DVR (mythtv for the last 13 years now)
scheduled TV is for pro sports, and pro sports is for boomers and older.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 28 2015, @02:21AM
I have seen a lot of articles over the last decade that point to dropping interest in sports. (Sorry, don't have a link handy and I'm too lazy to google it now.) But the porn/soft porn stuff is a joke, right? Why would a young male waste time on a network-produced pile of soft porn when they can have real porn instantly? For that matter, why bother with porn at all when they can pull up any number of hook-up apps? Maybe technology is bending the interests of the young male demographic back toward real life.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 28 2015, @11:54AM
In retrospect I was tired when I posted having been up unusually late on the weekend and you're 100% correct with two minor corrections, one simple one is "the young guys" at work seem more interested in extreme sports type stuff than, say, major league baseball, then you add the guys who will watch jet propelled speedboats to the legacy jocks and you've got enough demographic to keep it alive, it'll get much better viewership than boomer cooking/lifestyle shows on PBS, for example.
The soft pr0n thing is for decades I've heard it said that there's no such thing as female-acceptable pr0n, etc. However, prime time network TV provides us with endless shows that boil down to college girls in bikinis suntanning, maybe a shirtless guy for the ladies lifting weights, and some idiotic game show that can more or less be ignored bracketing it. Think of "Big Brother" TV show, or the non-all stars Survivor. I haven't watched the amazing race yet this season but historically they always have at least one female model team who only packed tiny swim suits and yoga pants to wear. By myself I wouldn't watch that, but if my wife's willing to watch while I get a good look, well that's OK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 28 2015, @07:20PM
Great post,
Being mid-40's I can say The Muppets used to be an actually good show. Guest stars, musical numbers, decent jokes, and odd characters. What this mocumentary styled thing is... is crap with no where to go but down. Two script writers needed some suckers to bring their drivel to life, and used the muppets (on the verge of taking off again) were dragged under and drowned. I hope this re-write show dies quick. The only "TV" show I've watched over the air in years... now back to my cut cord entertainment!