MORE THAN RATINGS: The Unlikely Survival of Low-Rated Shows
Well, the renewals season has come and gone and many of your favorite shows have been weighed and judged: renewed or consigned to the graveyard of cancelled shows that will only be heard from again when the dedicated take to the internet to reminisce. The fates of these shows are often hard to fathom - sure the ratings are public information but networks don’t like to publicise their decision making rationale and it’s not just ratings that count; demographic, cost of production and yes, vocal fan support, all play a part. Of course any network still has all those hours to fill with programming and there are only so many reality documentaries the public will stand. This year the two series that seemed to garner the most attention were the unlikely survival of Fringe and Community. Both have been struggling badly for ratings and both have dedicated followers determined to keep attention on them to keep them being made. Personally, I’m a big fan of both, so it was lovely to be able to look forward to more next year. But here’s the thing - how do these shows survive, if no-one is watching? Let’s start with Fringe. No, actually let’s start with the great breakout hit of genre television - Lost. It’s become cool to be mean about Lost now that it’s over, and I’ve always felt it’s had an uncomfortable relationship with elements of geek culture due to it being, y’know, kind of mainstream and popular, and it’s habit of co-opting very geeky concepts without properly exploring them in favour of more episodes about Kate being whiney and pointless. But it was a very successful show that spawned countless attempts to replicate its winning formula, of which Fringe is pretty much the last show standing.
Geek Syndicate
ship having pretty much flatlined since the start of season three. Fox have even gone so far as to admit that the show loses them money to air on an episode-by-episode basis. What is most interesting about this ratings figure is that the great Lost dream of Geekdom, Joss Whedons Firefly, was cancelled by the same network with an average viewership of 4.48 million. So what has changed? Well for one thing the nature of the industry has changed. Subscription cable channels are making inroads into the viewership of the mainstream channels like Fox and NBC, fragmenting further an already fragmented audience. Time-shifting means that “first run” statistics no longer always give a good picture of what is going on and the powerful “Nielson” ratings are struggling to keep up with the times. The cable operators particularly can make more money off fewer viewers, whilst producing quality product less people watched the first season of Game of Thrones on HBO than watched the fourth series of Fringe but no-one is going to accuse it of struggling for viewers, nor making a loss. Why? Because it’s on cable - and the cable business model means that many people will subscribe just to watch Game of Thrones, and many of the same people will then buy it on Blu-Ray and effectively subsidise them making shows people aren’t watching in droves like Treme.
9
Heavily marketed as mix of Lost and that other great cross-over show The X-Files, Fringe ended its first (and in my view, creatively weakest) series with a pretty respectable 9.2 million viewers in the US and was a shoe-in for renewal. This may be a long way shy of Lost’s season One figures of a staggering 20.7 million (and is actually lower than Lost’s lowest season finale figure!), but certainly nothing to be sniffed at. This is the high-water mark for the series and by the time season four’s finale aired the viewership was down to a mere 3.11 million, with viewer-