Volume Viewing

We're quickly approaching cold and flu season, which means we are also starting to close in on another big season - marathon TV watching season. I have no scientific formula to back this up but I honestly believe that a day of never leaving your couch wrapped in a warm blanket and watching many consecutive hours of mind-numbing television is good for both the body and the soul. The only question is which show you decide to pass the hours with. The grandfather of them all is, of course, "Law & Order". I am pretty sure that at least one episode of that series is on at all hours of the day across the Globe. However, you could make the case that "NCIS" is nipping at its heals. (I don't think I have ever sat down and watched a new episode of "NCIS" but thanks to its continual marathon on USA I feel pretty confident that I could parachute in to this week's brand-new episode and have a pretty good sense that I hadn't missed much.) I'm hardly alone in choosing to watch old episodes of a good show rather than new episodes of a bad one - many night during the summer reruns of "The Big Bang Theory" on TBS will get the higher ratings than anything else on basic cable. The simple fact is people like to watch something they know is going to be good over risking wasting time with something which could be new but awful. What is crazy is that I think networks have finally caught on that this is how you build a bigger fanbase.

Thanks to things like on-Demand libraries, iTunes, Hulu or countless other programs available to the general population, more people are watching old episodes of TV shows than ever, they just aren't doing it in the traditional ways. The days of clearing your schedule to make sure you didn't miss your favorite show are long over. As long as you don't work with people who enjoy spoiling the endings of shows there is actually no incentive to catch a show the night it airs. In fact, one of the more popular ways to watch a hit show these days is to wait until the season is over and bang through all the episodes in a couple of nights so you don't have to deal with cliffhangers for an entire week. I would say it speaks poorly to my generation's level of patience but the generations coming up behind me are even worse - they will watch the end of one episode and immediately go online to learn what is going to happen next week. You could argue it is a testament to the good writing on TV today but more likely it is because most kids under the age of 14 have never had to wait a week for anything in their entire lives. The point is that binge-watching several episodes at a time appears to be the newest way to become fans of a sitcom and it may be changing the way these massive communication companies are doing business.

It used to be that in order to get a second life in syndication a show had to have a really successful first run that was now over. But what I have noticed in the last few months is that if a show is even a mild hit the first time around cable executives can't wait to throw in on their air in 3 or 4 hour chunks as soon as they have enough episodes to do so - even if it is still on the air. Tune in to TNT or TBS one afternoon and you will often find a block of shows that will be on NBC or ABC later that night. Sometimes I think this is being done on purpose as a way to boost the ratings for a sagging show on a network. Most of the time the two channels will be owned by one larger company so this method really helps both stations as well as the fans. Die hard fans of the show are happy to be able to see old episodes the networks would never normally have time to run and thus if fans wanted to see them they would have to pony up the cash and buy the DVDs, so this is a cheaper alternative. Also, new fans who have only see all these reruns are now inclined to check out the new episodes when they air for the first time in prime time. I mentioned I have yet to start watching "NCIS" when it is on but I would bet I am in the minority. (They get the most viewers of any show on network television, so clearly they are doing something right.) If I wanted to I certainly wouldn't need to do much research to catch up on what I've missed.

What I will be fascinated to see is if this also changes the way shows are cancelled. Just yesterday I was reading that CBS cancelled one of its new shows, "We Are Men", after two episodes due to poor ratings. I've previously talked about how different the standards are between network and basic cable ratings (bad network ratings would often be record-breakers on basic cable), so I wonder if in the future shows which have 10 or 13 episodes completed but will never be aired will get shown on a network's sister basic cable channel to try and see if future episodes could build ratings back up, like a baseball player going through a bad slump getting sent down to the minors to get their timing back. Considering that I think networks are often too quick to yank new shows anyway it may be the only way cable networks can fill their lineups in a few years. (Understand this: I am not advocating doing this for "We Are Men". That show looked bad from the start.) I'm just saying it would be a very interesting way to do things in the future. They could also eventually start showing new programs on cable first to see if they can succeed at that level before adding them to the network schedule. I know it sounds like a backwards way of doing things but when I can look at a TV slate and pick out the shows which are going to get cancelled immediately (and never should have been made in the first place), it isn't like TV executives have any better ideas.