Roush on Gossip Girl
Question: I was just reading a list of the overall TV ratings for the last season and was surprised because it doesn't correlate with what I thought were "hits." For example,
Gossip Girl has had lots of buzz but was way at the bottom of the list, not even high among CW's own shows.
Bionic Woman was supposedly a disaster but was in the top third of the list, equivalent to
Boston Legal. And
ER, which I was convinced no one watches anymore, was still solid at the edge of the top third and significantly higher than other Thursday NBC shows like
The Office. Obviously other factors come in to play such as performance against competitors, 18-49 viewership, DVR viewership and critical reaction, but there still seems to be a discrepancy. Does fan reaction contribute, or do TV executives just pick their favorites to promote?
— Fiona
Matt Roush: Ratings don't always tell the entire story, clearly, and the point of your observations appears to be that buzz doesn't always correlate to ratings. Nothing new in that. Bionic Woman's overall ratings average may appear higher than many because it opened strongly, but it almost immediately began to fade, while creatively it cratered. NBC ditching that show and not trying to revive it after the strike was one of the network's wisest decisions of the past year. Gossip Girl may not draw big numbers, but it's one of those shows, like The Office, which has found considerable success online and in downloads and in the media at large, which love to write about it and spotlight its attractive cast. So its value as a signature show for the CW goes beyond the number who watch it in real time on its first run. Plus, it's all about who's watching, and if a show like GG attracts the right concentration of young female viewers, it's still a success, much like cable shows targeting a specific niche can be called a hit if they draw a decent audience — although they would often look like a failure on a broadcast network. As for a long-running show like ER, there's still a loyal core audience that tunes in, never having kicked the habit. That's why it's still around, even in its diminished creative state. It only looks like a failure if you compare it to the show's peak years, when it was an incontestable hit and still made stars of its cast (kind of the way Grey's Anatomy does now), once generating the kind of buzz that NBC's hipper comedies now attract, despite doing only middling business.
