Over the Airwaves

It's 8:59 on a Wednesday night in April 2006. All across America, throughout living rooms, pubs, dorm rooms and apartments, groups of friends and families are gathered around the pulsing blue glow of their TV sets. Tuned to ABC, they are rapt with attention, eagerly awaiting the newest episode of the runaway hit LOST. As the show begins, two people are walking along a beach. Par for the course, so far. Yet, as they begin to talk to one another, a strange feeling of deja vu sets in. This dialogue is familiar. These scenes are familiar! The shocking truth sets in. "Another repeat?!" cry the tortured screams of a thousand desperate souls.

This was the scene far too often during the second season of Lost. But why? What happened that so often caused rabid viewers to sit down on their couches only to find that Locke, Jack and Kate would not be continuing their adventures just yet? And what does it mean for TV?

For its second season, Lost received an order for 23 episodes - a typical number for network shows of its kind. However, these 22 weeks-worth of episodes (the finale was a two-hour event) were in fact spread over 36 weeks, leading to both many repeats and a growing amount of discontent among viewers. These sporadically-timed, seemingly random repeats (which were usually only announced the previous week) were due to one thing: Nielsen ratings and the “sweeps” periods that come along with them.

As many know, the Nielsen ratings system, owned by Nielsen Media Research, is the dominant analyzer of “the audience size and composition of television programming”, according to Wikipedia. Nielsen lets networks, and then by extension, advertisers, know who is watching what, and when. As explained in this excellent summary of the ratings system, the Nielsen system is heavily dependent on “sweeps”, four periods of time during the year when the Nielsen systems take purportedly representative samples of the nation’s watching habits. Advertisers can then determine when they want to advertise their products, and the networks can determine how much they want to charge the advertisers.

Sweeps, however, are a bygone of an earlier age. They originated in the days before electronic ratings gathering systems were available: the term comes from the way the mailings of viewer diaries would “sweep” across the nation, starting in the East Coast and moving west. Clearly, in an age of instantly-responsive electronics, the Internet, DVRs, and downloadable media content, the framework for network television shows couldn’t be derived from a structure developed more than 50 years ago based on diary availabilities, could it? I’ll give you two guesses.

On a surface level it should seem abundantly clear that an outdated model such as this should be altered or replaced. The issue, however, was mostly academic until the fall of 2004, when Lost first hit the airwaves. After Lost’s first season, during which it developed a huge and devoted following, the popularity of serialized drama shows soared to new levels. Prior to this new wave of serials, the types of shows that had been affected by mid-season, sweeps-induced hiatuses were sitcoms, reality shows, and largely self-contained drama series like Law and Order or The X-Files. All of these shows had plots that, with some exceptions, resolved themselves within a single episode. For example, Agent Mulder suspects that his neighbors are aliens, finds out they are, and fails to catch them in the end. The following week would be a totally unrelated plot. This all changed with the Lost model, however. Virtually every episode of Lost is a cliffhanger unto itself; Locke finds a mysterious bunker in the woods, and mentions how they need to find dynamite to blast it open. The next week’s episode would then detail the search for said dynamite. This continues over the entire season. Under this model, even a week hiatus can seem like an eternity to a regular viewer, and can lead to an incredible amount of frustration on the audience’s part. Many fans of Lost found their patience with the show waning under these delays, and viewership was down after the second season.

It is within everyone’s interest, from viewers to network executives, to find a new way to rectify the conflicting schedules of Sweeps periods and the typical 24 episode order of serialized television shows.

# posted by Robert O'Neill @ Tuesday, March 27, 2007