Consider:
NBC won 13 of the first 15 weeks of the season, largely on the
strength of Sunday Night Football and "The Voice." Since the
end of football season, "Do No Harm" lasted two episodes, "1600
Penn" and "Deception" are on the bubble, and "Smash" returned
to such dismal ratings it's been banished to Saturday night. NBC
is pinning its hopes now on "Hannibal," which debuts April 4, and
even it is derivative of Fox's hit "The Following." What's more,
as mentioned elsewhere, last month NBC fell to fifth, trailing even
Univision. ("The Following," BTW, has been the only broadcast hit
of midseason.)
ABC has also come up with two disasters: "Zero Hour" and "Red Window,"
while CBS's "Golden Boy" is at least a "maybe."
The shows creating the buzz are on cable or PBS: "The Walking Dead"
(AMC), "The Bible" (the History Channel), "Downton Abbey" (PBS), all of
which have beaten their competition (the first two have even made the
top 10 among all primetime shows); "Mad Men" starts its new season April 7.
As an article in my local paper this morning put it:
At a moment when social-media buzz and other viewer engagement are
metrics of success as never before, CBS's slate scores in old-fashioned ways:
entertaining, reassuring, even pleasantly anesthetizing its audience.
This leaves the other networks to try to copy not themselves, as CBS does
so brilliantly, but rather cable's celebrated strategy of not copying itself.
The joke may just be on the broadcast networks (excluding CBS) and not just
NBC.
NBC won 13 of the first 15 weeks of the season, largely on the
strength of Sunday Night Football and "The Voice." Since the
end of football season, "Do No Harm" lasted two episodes, "1600
Penn" and "Deception" are on the bubble, and "Smash" returned
to such dismal ratings it's been banished to Saturday night. NBC
is pinning its hopes now on "Hannibal," which debuts April 4, and
even it is derivative of Fox's hit "The Following." What's more,
as mentioned elsewhere, last month NBC fell to fifth, trailing even
Univision. ("The Following," BTW, has been the only broadcast hit
of midseason.)
ABC has also come up with two disasters: "Zero Hour" and "Red Window,"
while CBS's "Golden Boy" is at least a "maybe."
The shows creating the buzz are on cable or PBS: "The Walking Dead"
(AMC), "The Bible" (the History Channel), "Downton Abbey" (PBS), all of
which have beaten their competition (the first two have even made the
top 10 among all primetime shows); "Mad Men" starts its new season April 7.
As an article in my local paper this morning put it:
At a moment when social-media buzz and other viewer engagement are
metrics of success as never before, CBS's slate scores in old-fashioned ways:
entertaining, reassuring, even pleasantly anesthetizing its audience.
This leaves the other networks to try to copy not themselves, as CBS does
so brilliantly, but rather cable's celebrated strategy of not copying itself.
The joke may just be on the broadcast networks (excluding CBS) and not just
NBC.
