Today's stars can't match a fraction of yesteryear's sitcoms
It was a Friday night at 5:00pm, starting to get dark when I walked into my boss’ corner office at ABC.
Four people were waiting for me:
- The boss
- The head of Primetime Sales Proposals, inventory control in layman’s terms, our McCann Erickson Ad Agency Sales Account Executive
- His immediate boss and, finally
- The Sr. V.P. for ABC Eastern sales.
How many cooks does it take to spoil ABC’s Primetime broth? My office abutted where my boss kept the group coffee machine. When he wanted me, on occasion he’d bang on the wall to get me moving. McCann wanted the deal done quick, and then to catch their trains.
“I don’t have another Dynasty that week,” I told them. “But I can split the money and give them a list of shows.”
Instead, McCann Erickson, Coca Cola’s national buyer called us back to quash the idea, saying they wanted Dynasty or that money would find its way down 6th Avenue. The Sr. V.P. took a long toke on his Parliament and barked, “Find them a Hotel, Sternberg!” The rest of us shook our heads.
Who’d take Hotel over Dynasty? But he was the boss. I moved another advertiser out of that Hotel in Coca Cola’s flight and would mop it up on Monday, were the buyer, who I well knew, to take the Hotel. I told our brain trust how it would come to fruition. The salesman called McCann Erickson and, surprising us all when McCann called back, Coke took it.
(Disclosures: I worked with McCann’s Coke buyer at Ogilvy & Mather. While at Ogilvy, that same Sr. VP called me to tell me apply to McCann Erickson for that Coke buyer’s job, too!)
Hotel was at the bottom of our A list, maybe not even.
But one Primetime show that no buyer who wanted Dynasty but settled for Hotel to close a package would take to close a package was one of our hits: Full House. It’s not that no advertiser wanted it. It was that no advertiser asked for it. No one had it on their preferred program lists. Most were simple: Dynasty and Moonlighting.
As was said in Square Pegs, the short-lived CBS comedy that introduced Sarah Jessica Parker, Full House, Benson, Mr. Belvedere and Webster were a “totally different head,” not so much a comedy block but, rather, a prime weekend time kids block. In Full House’s second year, in point of fact, its average rating was its average rating for its entire eighth year run. And its last two years were 15% lower than that average.
As an ABC guy, Full House was flush for two or three years. I don’t remember meeting any of its crew at our upfront season sales parties, but I met one Full House writer, Doug McIntyre, at a New Jersey book reading. He wrote or contributed to many Full House episodes. I said, “I worked in Primetime at ABC. Full House did very well for us.” He acted like Full House’s ratings were tantamount to Maury Povich. Surely Full House did better than Moonlighting’s repeats. But even then, advertisers wanted Moonlighting repeats, not Full House’s repeats.
Admittedly, at the end of the Full House run, it landed in the Top 20 a few times. But it got an 11.0% rating during its first season and its rating are a TV program’s currency. When 1991-92 Full House got its highest average rating a formidable Household share of 17.4% of U.S. TV Households, 82.6% of them escaped it; which, if it’s cool, brings us to Nicolle Wallace.
Nicole Wallace is a news superstar… on my Facebook page. Recently back from a break to welcome a new baby to her family, I wouldn’t have recognized Ms. Wallace if someone hadn’t posted a picture of her at a prominent local appearance. She’s seemingly worshipped by her viewers. And, her show, Deadline: White House is currently the eighth most popular show on MSNBC. It is watched by a total of 1,606,000 people, a 0.51%, or like most all other shows in today’s ultra-fragmented tv world, zero in statistical significance. The least significant number that moves the meter is 4.5; which rounds up to a 5.0. For Nicolle Wallace to register at all with a significant chunk of any of TV’s demographic universes, it would have to take most all of the commercial inventory on too many of Peacock’s highest rated shows to count.
U.S. TV Database, my source for the ratings, says that hers is TV’s 86th most popular show. But ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and CW program nearly 100 Primetime hours alone. And, with digital broadcast, ad-supported cable, satellite and streaming, 86th place out of a field of thousands sounds wishful.
Wallace is not alone in this invisibility predicament. Most of today’s stars get that same zero rating. But many have gotten their zeros over many years. Still, they’re magnified so far out of proportion that they’re Lilliputians. But, when they look in their mirrors each morning, they see Gulliver. Further, the difference in Full House’s audience and Wallace’s, for example, based on these numbers, is this: if Nicolle Wallace gets 0.5% on average and Full House got 11.0%, in its lowest season, computing her reach is not straight math. Nicole Wallace is more than 22 airings behind Full House because Full House’s 11.0% is an 11 reach with a one-time frequency. When Wallace airs and gets a 0.5, she doesn’t get to an unduplicated 11.0 with 22 telecasts. Instead, she delivers her advertisers a 5.0 reach, 2.20 times. With all of the noise out there, even 22 showings can’t be counted on to cut through the racket.