Insiders Offer Thoughts on the Cancellation Process
This is not something new but has been the mode of operation for the television industry since the medium’s early days. The problem with such a business model, however, is that the television industry has drastically changed in recent years. As a society, we no longer sit in the living room as a family and watch the latest episodes of our favorite programs, live and in unison. We have Tivo and DVRs, which can record television transmissions and allow us to watch them at our own convenience. We have Hulu, which enables us to watch television on a computer screen rather than an actual TV set and with an Internet connection as opposed to cable subscription. With such technological innovations and changes in viewing habits, why does the television industry still cling to the outdated method of determining the fate of a television series based on the Neilsen ratings from the actual broadcast?
Craig Engler, general manager and senior vice president of Syfy Digital, is an industry insider who has heard that argument by many frustrated fans in recent years, especially in regards to cancellations within the realm of science fiction. In January 2011, Engler wrote on Blastr both an explanation and justification about the current thought process that goes into determining whether a show should live or die. “There’s some truth to what’s being said, but there are also lots of misconceptions and things people overlook when the topic comes up,” he argues. “My goal isn’t to convince you the TV ratings system is bad or good, it’s to explain how and why the system works the way it does and separate out fact from fiction.”
First and foremost, of course, is that television is a business and like with any business, its priority is to make a profit. That profit, meanwhile, is almost exclusively derived from advertising dollars. “TV ratings don’t just measure how many people watch a TV show, they measure how many people watch the ads in TV shows,” Engler points out. “This is hugely important to both TV networks and advertisers because billions of dollars each year are spent buying TV ads, and everybody wants to know what they’re getting for their money. The Nielsens provide a way for ad sellers and ad buyers to get data on a level playing field (i.e. every network agrees to use the same system) that comes from an impartial third party, so we’re all comparing apples to apples.”
Although Hulu and the websites of major networks place ads within the online episodes that are available for viewing, the advertisements are both fewer and different than those from an actual television broadcast. Lumping the number of viewers who watch a television show online with those that watched it on television during its initial broadcast changes the “apples to apples” paradigm. Coca Cola, for instance, may buy advertising time during the initial broadcast but not online, thus making the combined viewership number insignificant from their perspective. In the end, Coca Cola does not care how many people actually saw the latest episode of The Office, they only care about how many people saw their commercial.
Tivo and DVR viewing, meanwhile, may contain the original commercials but there is a greater tendency among viewers to skip those “word from our sponsor” moments, so such numbers are not as significant either. The data is still made available to both the networks and advertisers but they do not carry the same weight as the live Neilsen numbers—although Craig Engler does concede that “we also know people watching live TV get up during commercials to use the bathroom, raid the fridge, etc.”
Which of course raises another question: exactly how reliable are the Neilsens? They are not, after all, an actual calculation of what every person in every single household in the country is watching at any given hour but based upon sampling instead. “Sampling is another of those terms that sounds like exactly what it is,” Engler writes. “Nielsen looks at a sample of households around the United States, and from that sample they make a statistical estimate about what everyone else is watching.”
Although the concept may sound flawed and filled with potential inaccuracies to the average observer, Engler insists that is not the case from an industry insider point of view. “All of the other data we look at—shows people watch on demand, DVD sales, digital downloads from iTunes and Amazon, streams on the Internet, visits to show Web sites, even piracy—give us different metrics to look at alongside TV ratings to make sure nothing really weird is going on,” he explains. “Comparing all this data reveals that highly rated shows are streamed more frequently online, sell more DVDs, have higher sales on Amazon and, yes, are pirated more often. When you account for variables that impact all these metrics, we don’t see the crazy variances that you’d expect if ratings weren’t very accurate.”
Although Craig Engler concedes that the current system may not be perfect, he still maintains it is the best system available to accurately gauge the viewers that matter—the ones that the advertisers are interested in. A television series costs bug bucks to produce and any network needs to not only cover those costs but make a significant profit as well in order to keep their shareholders happy. This is a fact of life and no different than any other large industry within corporate America. Online and Tivo viewings may indeed be significant for many television shows but the reality is that the revenue such viewings generate are miniscule when compared to an actual television broadcast.
“Is the system going to stay this way forever?” Engler asks in conclusion. “Not at all. The TV and online industries are both in massive flux right now, and that will continue for a long while. Five years ago, online revenue for TV shows was counted in pennies, and now it’s counted in nickels. Hopefully it will get to quarters in the next few years, and then online viewing might really start making an impact on the ability of TV networks to renew shows.”
While Craig Engler offered one insider viewpoint on the inner workings of the television industry, another was put forward by FX president John Landgraf. Instead of simply placing a phone call to the executive producers of the cancelled crime drama Terriers, he met with them in his office and presented a more detailed explanation for his decision not to renew the series. One of those producers was veteran television writer Tim Minear, who has created or been involved with a number of high quality television shows in recent years—including Firefly, Wonderfalls, The Inside, Drive and Dollhouse—all of which have been prematurely short-lived.
“It was the first time, and I told him this in the room, that the president of the network had brought me in, or brought me and my partners in, to really explain why he was about to do this thing he kind of had to do,” Minear told Assignment X in December 2010.
The conversation that took place between Tim Minear, the other producers of Terriers and John Landgraf centered on the fact that the network did not merely look at the low ratings that the critically-acclaimed series experienced but the reasons behind them as well. “He had done all this market research to really probe why the show hadn’t launched to bigger ratings,” Minear explained. “And there was a conventional wisdom that he had been forming, that it had been the combination of the promotions and the poster and the title. All those things probably, to one degree or another, affected that. What he sat us down to show us was that he really explored those things, and the conventional wisdom didn’t really hold with the numbers in some ways.”
The poster that Tim Minear refers to contains the main characters on the top but dwarfed by a much larger and prominent image of an open-mouthed terrier dog below. The tag line reads, “Just when you thought crime dramas were safe,” in regards to the unorthodox nature of the series, but in hindsight could just as easily refer to the genre being one of the safer bets when it comes to television shows. Terriers, however, was still cancelled.
“I think that what we did learn is that your title needs to be part of your marketing,” Minear concludes in regards to Terriers. “It needs to say something to the audience to break through the noise of everything else that’s out there. If you have something like Heroes, that’s a great title. And you can see that title, even in print, with those characters standing in front, with the sun behind the Earth, and you know what that show is promising to be, and then you tune into the pilot and it delivers on that promise. Pretty much every show that I’ve worked on has had a terrible title. Wonderfalls doesn’t tell you anything, The Inside doesn’t tell you anything, Firefly doesn’t tell you anything—none of these titles tell you anything. Terriers sounds like it will be a reality show about dog grooming.”
While the comments of Craig Engler and John Landgraf may not be a shock or surprise to more astute followers of the industry, it is refreshing nonetheless to hear such insiders offer insights into their decision making process. Despite all the data and marketing research at their disposal, however, neither the head of a network nor a television creator can truly predict what show is going to find the necessary ratings to sustain a series for the long haul.
“Sometimes it’s just a mystery of timing, of alchemy, of whatever,” Tim Minear himself observes. “The mood that the country’s in at the time and the mood that the audience is in at the time.”
In short, television is business and not one without risk. When a quality series is cancelled due to poor ratings, it’s not merely a matter of network executives trying to break the hearts of the show’s loyal fans but a recognition that they gambled and lost. It may not ease the pain but it is the reality of the business nonetheless—at least for the time being.
Anthony Letizia (January 31, 2011)
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