WK 2-3 4 5 6 7 8 9 M: 5.7 4.3 4.9 4.7 4.6/1.3 4.3/1.3* 4/1.2 T: 6.7 6.2 5.8 5.4 6.1/1.8 6.5/2.0 5.7/1.4 W: 6.2 5.7 6.2 5.2 5.0/1.5 4.7/1.3* 4.6/1.4 Th: 4.9 4.9 5.2 5.0 4.4/1.6 4.7/1.7 4.6/1.6 F: 5.6 5.3 5.0 6.2 5.1/1.2 4.6/1.2 4.7/1.2 Ave: 5.8 5.3 5.4 5.3 5.3/1.5 5.0/1.5 4.7/1.4
Week 9 is now Leno's worst week ever. By my records, there has only been one week all season in which Leno's average viewers (rounded to the nearest tenth of a million) has increased from the previous week, and that was week 5 (a month ago) by only 1/10 of a million viewers. This week his viewership declined again from the previous week - by .3M,, and his average rating in the demo was below 1.5 (the very low minimum standard set by NBC) for the first time all season. At this rate the next week Leno will show any increase will be Thanksgiving - assuming he does some kind of live Thanksgiving special. Last week I predicted that Leno would return to his pre-World Series numbers (which would be a gain of .3M to about 5.3M) instead he went the exact other direction. There was a not a single night all week where he improved on last week's numbers entirely (he did get .1 more viewers on Friday, but stayed the same in the demo). This is really, really bad. Forget everything you have heard from NBC about how this show can make a profit at any speed - it really can't survive, for multiple reasons, averaging less that 4.75 million viewers and 1.4 in the demo. A few weeks ago I would have written that this is to be expected - the Leno show is not really built for speed during sweeps months, and has to make its hay the other way, during rerun season. But the performance of this show has been so disappointing this season that the affiliates have already said that they were only going to keep quiet until they see how they do in November. If the affiliates start officially bitching in December the stink of failure will be so strong on this show that it may not be able to comeback. We saw Leno try to respond proactively this week with reports that he moved what he thingk are his most popular bits up front - I would like to read any fancy internal analysis that looks at how this worked - perhaps they think it kept them from doing even worse against sweeps shows. In any case, they obviously need to do something more dramatic than just tinker on the margins. More and more it looks like there are going to be some significant changes made to this show over the next 3 to 6 weeks. I had thought they would wait until January for any major re-thinking, but now it may be that they can't wait that long. Leno will probably try to make it more tweeks to the format of the show - I would not be surprised to see the desk come back, for example, and he may try again to reconfigure the feel of the audience. But I doubt those kinds of things will be enough this time I think you may seem something like NBC dropping 2 or 3 minutes of his opening monologue into the last commercial break of the preceding 9:00 show, or even have the first 10 minutes of the Leno Show air at 9:30, push the end of the 9:00 show to 10:10 and have Leno finish up at 11:00 - something like that. Moving up the local news only makes sense to me if they make a profound change in Leno - cut it back to 30 minutes. Give Leno a monologue, a comedy bit and a 7 minute interview and then go right to a 60 minute late local news (or 30 minute news and syndicated sit-com) before Conan. I still like the idea of scaling Leno back to 2 or 3 nights and get NBC back into the 10:00 program development business a few nights at 10:00. I read that AB nixed that idea because NBC has nothing to put on, but I think they could start with re-purposing some of their cable programs. In a couple of ways, this weeks numbers are even worse than they seem: On Wed SVU had its second biggest rating of the season, and Leno was still down from last week, and in fact had his worst Wed of the year. On Tue Biggest Loser was up 6% from last week, and Leno was still down 5%, with his second worst Tue night of the year. If these are signs that Leno is starting to lose once reliable holdover viewers from his lead-in, he is really screwed. All season we have seen that Leno's ratings are very dependent on his lead in; it seems there are not more than 4M or so Americans who consciously plan on watching Leno at 10:00, but another 1.5M or so are likely to stick around and watch if they are already on an NBC show and see a promo that hooks them. If the number of holdovers from the lead in really begins to erode over the next few weeks Leno is really, really, screwed. This may be related to something else I have read a few places that last couple of weeks, which is that Leno skews to young males. The problem is his two best lead ins probably skew to middle aged women (Loser and SVU). If Leno really does start becoming more of a "Car Guy", NBC is going to have to find a way to give him a few macho lead-ins at 9:00. Programming Note: In response to a few off-channel inquiries, the numbers I cite here should not be taken as precise gospel. For the most part I get them from TV By The Numbers - though by the time I look at them on Saturday morning I often can't find the Monday and Tuesday ratings, so I get those from zap to it, and when I bother to compare the two sources, sometimes they differ a little. If anyone knows of a web site where more accurate season to date ratings for the Leno Show are kept I would love to see it. Also, on some nights TV By The Numbers reports Leno's ratings at both the 10:00 and 10:30 intervals (I don't know why). When they do that I just average the two half hours, but I don't know if that is really appropriate. Moreover, it seems that sometime TV By The Numbers revises their numbers later, and I don't always know which numbers I am using, the original or the revised, or how different they are from each other. In other words, I am not claiming to provide the definitive ratings book for the Leno Show here, just trying to track as best I can its progress over the year, partly to get a somewhat a view of the success of this interesting television experiment independent of the press releases and spin from NBC and its acolytes. I am not a Leno fan, but I have not been a critic of this experiment, and indeed from the time they announced it last December I have been convinced that it was probably a good short and maybe even medium term business decision for them. I have been surprised that the experiment so far is under performing. Starting this week, I have started with the average of Week 2 and 3, and rounding the numbers to the nearest tenth, in an attempt to keep the "table" intact. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
