Petry: Talkshows will rise, while gavelers fall
Ratings will be pulled from one to benefit the other, sez Losak
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That's the good word from Garnett Losak, VP and director of programming for the Petry Media Group. The org explored NATPE-convention trends during Petry's presentation to its TV-station clients Monday evening at Caesars Palace.
The potential audience gains for the long-running talkers will come at the expense of the court shows, Losak says, which "will continue to contract in the ratings because there are so many of them."
The one plus for court shows in 2001-02 is that there are no new ones in the NATPE hopper for the fall to pull rating points away from the eight or nine that will be back for another season.
In all program categories, the majority of returning five-a-weekers have declined in the ratings this season because "the consolidation of distribution companies means that one distributor may be selling a massive number of different shows to stations," Losak says. "It's not surprising that some of these conglomerates are taking their eye off the ball."
Although Losak doesn't offer specific show-by-show recommendations among the new series for sale on the NATPE floor, her generic advice to TV stations is to stick with an ongoing strip rather than take a chance on an unproven freshman.
"Even the bottom tier of returning talkshows such as 'Jenny Jones' and 'Queen Latifah' provide a comfort level to the viewers who watch them," Losak says.
"Latifah" is barely moving the dials of the Nielsen meters, hovering around a 1 rating, but Losak says she'd be inclined to tell her stations to renew it, even if distributors are hawking promising newcomers at cheaper prices.
Viewer familiarity is also a plus with the daytime gameshows like "Family Feud," she says, so TV stations should include them in the programming mix.
"The deal for daytime gameshows seldom involves heavy cash outlays by the stations," she says, "and the shows themselves are advertiser-friendly," unlike some of the talkshows that deliberately push the boundaries of content.
The new version of "Card Sharks," for example, has no cash payment attached; instead, the TV stations give half of the seven-minute commercial load in each 30-minute edition to the distributor, Pearson TV.
Losak sounds a modified alarm about the two dominant early-evening gameshows, "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy."
"Wheel" tumbled in the Nov. 2000 sweeps by 17% among adults 25 to 54 from the same period a year ago, and "Jeopardy's" decline was even steeper at 29%.
But both shows shrugged off similar declines in the 1991-92 season and the 1994-95 season. The two shows came back, at least in part because King World, the distributor, had drawn up contracts that prohibited stations from banishing them to lesser time periods.
To her station clients that are worried about the "Wheel" and "Jeopardy" slide, Losak says: "Keep your heads."
She urges the stations to push King World to ramp up the promotion of the venerable gameshows, supporting them with extra local promos.
Losak says she's puzzled at the trend toward post-11 p.m. relationship shows because the existing ones are scaring up so few viewers.
She chalks up the trend, at least in part, to "a down period for the off-network sitcoms that used to take up many of the late-fringe time periods now being set aside for these young-skewing reality shows."
Losak concluded her analysis by returning to the most visible trend, the talkshow, and reiterating the exhortation she has delivered on the subject during past NATPEs: Buy new talkshows under only two conditions.
First, the time period is a throwaway: If the rookie strip fails, the station's bottom line will suffer no harm.
Second, the only choices among available veteran talkshows are so dismal that a new one -- no matter how unpromising -- could hardly do any worse.
