Time to play … Television Math!
Ah spring, when a network's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of reruns. Yes, friends, it's that time of year again, when your favorite network drama seems to go on an endless hiatus. Usually I've written this in a comment here or there, but I'm setting it down, now, in hopes that in later years I can just point to it. Okay, ready? Let's go.
Most network television drama orders are for 22-24 episodes, because dramas are so expensive. In addition, in order to attract top talent, especially actors, to the show you need to give them enough hiatus to do movies and plays and things. Now, a year is 52 weeks long, but the television season runs from mid-September to mid-May, which brings us down to 34 weeks. If a network premieres their new season in mid-September (not all do and we'll talk about that in a moment) then they need to find 10 weeks during the course of the year to run either reruns or special programming like miniseries or sports.
Mucking up the placement of these 10 weeks is something called sweeps. American television networks are made up of a bunch of local stations, one in each of the 212 markets that Nielsen measures, that are paid by the networks to run their shows during prime time. The ratings are made up of a national sample that is distributed among those markets. Now, in very large markets like New York, LA, Chicago or Dallas, the sample size is large enough to have local ratings every day, just like the national sample. But in smaller markets like my hometown of Portland, ratings are measured four times a year during the sweeps. Of course, the local stations want their ratings to be as high as possible during sweeps so they can set higher advertising rates. Those sweeps months are November, February, May, and July.
For our purposes July doesn't matter since it's in the summer. But of those 24 shows, the network has to set aside 12 of them to run during November, February and May. In addition, they will want to run a steady stream of episodes in September and October to get you interested in the show. So that's another oh, 6 episodes for the fall.
How many are left for December, January, March, and April? 6. 6 new episodes for those 16 weeks. Now, Fox has to put everyone on hiatus in October anyway because of post-season baseball. (That's why the first episode of the Simpsons is Treehouse of Terror.) So they get a few more episodes to sprinkle around in April.
So why, you may ask, did we not used to care? Well, TV shows used to be cheaper and have more episodes, and until Stephen Bochco changed TV drama in the early 80s it wasn't as necessary to see them all in order. But now, with the ongoing stories, and the competition from cable channels who don't care about sweeps or even seasons, we need to see things in order, so we care more-so much that Fox starts 24 in January so it can run in straight weeks, no reruns, through the end of the season. And why just dramas? Comedies rarely need to run in sequence, so they rerun better and they're also cheaper to begin with. Reality shows, of course, have shorter seasons and are also cheaper, so they can have two full seasons of Survivor during the course of the regular TV season.
Friends, I know that the endless reruns and alternative programming in the spring is frustrating and tiresome. I watch Veronica Mars, myself, and we're only going to have 20 episodes this year, and we've seen 11 of them, so it's going to be a long spring. But until the economics of network television change dramatically-which will probably happen sooner than anyone is ready for-get used to a March and April of reruns.
I'm going to use the time to uh, do work for school? Eh, I'll just start watching BSG.
Most network television drama orders are for 22-24 episodes, because dramas are so expensive. In addition, in order to attract top talent, especially actors, to the show you need to give them enough hiatus to do movies and plays and things. Now, a year is 52 weeks long, but the television season runs from mid-September to mid-May, which brings us down to 34 weeks. If a network premieres their new season in mid-September (not all do and we'll talk about that in a moment) then they need to find 10 weeks during the course of the year to run either reruns or special programming like miniseries or sports.
Mucking up the placement of these 10 weeks is something called sweeps. American television networks are made up of a bunch of local stations, one in each of the 212 markets that Nielsen measures, that are paid by the networks to run their shows during prime time. The ratings are made up of a national sample that is distributed among those markets. Now, in very large markets like New York, LA, Chicago or Dallas, the sample size is large enough to have local ratings every day, just like the national sample. But in smaller markets like my hometown of Portland, ratings are measured four times a year during the sweeps. Of course, the local stations want their ratings to be as high as possible during sweeps so they can set higher advertising rates. Those sweeps months are November, February, May, and July.
For our purposes July doesn't matter since it's in the summer. But of those 24 shows, the network has to set aside 12 of them to run during November, February and May. In addition, they will want to run a steady stream of episodes in September and October to get you interested in the show. So that's another oh, 6 episodes for the fall.
How many are left for December, January, March, and April? 6. 6 new episodes for those 16 weeks. Now, Fox has to put everyone on hiatus in October anyway because of post-season baseball. (That's why the first episode of the Simpsons is Treehouse of Terror.) So they get a few more episodes to sprinkle around in April.
So why, you may ask, did we not used to care? Well, TV shows used to be cheaper and have more episodes, and until Stephen Bochco changed TV drama in the early 80s it wasn't as necessary to see them all in order. But now, with the ongoing stories, and the competition from cable channels who don't care about sweeps or even seasons, we need to see things in order, so we care more-so much that Fox starts 24 in January so it can run in straight weeks, no reruns, through the end of the season. And why just dramas? Comedies rarely need to run in sequence, so they rerun better and they're also cheaper to begin with. Reality shows, of course, have shorter seasons and are also cheaper, so they can have two full seasons of Survivor during the course of the regular TV season.
Friends, I know that the endless reruns and alternative programming in the spring is frustrating and tiresome. I watch Veronica Mars, myself, and we're only going to have 20 episodes this year, and we've seen 11 of them, so it's going to be a long spring. But until the economics of network television change dramatically-which will probably happen sooner than anyone is ready for-get used to a March and April of reruns.
I'm going to use the time to uh, do work for school? Eh, I'll just start watching BSG.