It seems like just two years ago I wrote a commentary explaining what sweeps is; and now here we are and sweeps is virtually indistinguishable from regular televsion.

In the old days (two years ago) when November or February or May came around, TV would get cheap and exciting like Paris Hilton before the launch of a new perfurme. They’d add crazy stunt casting to episodic shows. They’d cobble together variety specials. The news department would wrack their brains to come up with a common household product which, under the right bizarre combination of circumstances, kill you.

This month’s sweeps seems to have been mortallty wounded, at least, by a bizarre combination of circumstances. Instead of gimmick shows, the gimmick is the shows aren’t reruns. The Writer’s strike seems to have sucked all the life out of the season and it’s all they can do to tie up their truncated storylines, let alone end on a bang of some kind. The news departments seem more interested in maintaining (after layoffs and consolidations) than scaring you into watching. Watch or don’t watch, we’re having enough trouble scraping up the money to order more hairspray.

The numbers are grim. American Idol is coming up on the end of their season and they’re down about 20 percent from their numbers this time last year - and they’re still number one! And number two.  And three, on weeks when they have three shows. So everything else is doing even worse. Some of this decline is surely illusory, the result of unmonitored time-shifting, but some of it is also real, the result of people having more than three choices of what to watch.

I’m betting NBC throws in the towel first. They already have a good half-dozen little cable networks to stay in business - Bravo, USA and so on - so all they have to do is lay off a few more people, sell HEROES and DEAL OR NO DEAL to another network and their work is done. After that, it’s hard to say. Sumner Redstone is too cantankerous to shut down CBS without a fight, and Disney has such deep pockets that ABC could go on another 30 years before they even notice how much money they’re losing. Fox, well, it’s not all that expensive to run.

You may have already heard, seriously, that the CW is contemplating giving up Sunday nights. They’re talking about just turning over the whole bloc to someone else to program. It could be infomercials, if could be a mini-network that only runs one day a week where all the shows feature people who smoke Marlboros. Actually I’d watch that, if only to enjoy the cinematography challenges. So who knows, that’s a valid business model - we have the distribution apparatus, come rent our satellites. it’s not that much different from the birth of televsion, where a sponsor would buy a show and get to interfere all they wanted. Openly, of course.

One thing is for sure… another couple of sweeps like this one and the networks won’t be able to AFFORD ratings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under General, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.