Sunday Night Lights
Picture via Doug Mills/New York Times
First: sorry for the untimeliness in this post, but I’ve been busy working on the site’s redesign which you may or may not have noticed. Moving on.
FOX’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLII (that’s “42″ for those that don’t read Roman) was the second highest rated television program of all time coming in behind the finale for M*A*S*H. The game was seen by an estimated 97.5 million people (M*A*S*H reached 106 million people, though at a time when most people only had access to a handful of channels). I find this to be more or less astounding. Much of what contemporary culture is based on is the notion that there are very few things rallied around by everyone, and the steady decline in network television ratings is perhaps biggest example of this (followed closely by the lack of America’s appetite to consume large quantities of popular music). To see a singular event grab such a large percentage of our collective attention spans speaks highly about the event itself as well as providing a bit of reassurance to the networks that people will turn out en mass if there’s something actually worth checking out. But what is the subtext of these numbers? Do they suggest that the solution to the network’s audience migration problem lies solely in their ability to deliver something worth seeing (because there is a lot of television worth seeing that most audiences could care less about)? Or should we read into this that the magic lies in the very scarcity of the event itself? After all, what are the odds of getting a Super Bowl where the actual game was that good? More after the jump…
I suppose if there is something to learn about the future of network television its that “the live event” is what will ultimately pay the bills. This, of course, is easier said than done. After all, how many live events are 1) really worth watching in the first place and 2) unique to given network. Take tomorrow for example. Right now we’re smack dab in a fairly entertaining horse race amongst politicians, leading to what could eventually be a brokered convention this summer. For anyone with even the slightest bit of political interest this is good stuff and will, I imagine, plaster itself across the cable news channels and perhaps even the networks to some degree, but even if a good chunk of the populace tunes in there will be no one over-arching winner because its material that is available to everyone. CBS has the same data that NBC has than CNN has and so on. Then, it’s really just a contest between personalities.
As for the first point, outside of the Super Bowl what other network-exclusive event(s) are there over the course of a year that really have the potential to get every interested American in front of their television set. The Oscars, I suppose is close but clearly lacks the reach of something like the Super Bowl. More problematic is the material is often foreign to much of the audience. There Will Be Blood could win best picture (and probably should win, might I add), but by the time of telecast it’d be lucky if even five million people saw it. It’s hard to rally the troupes behind a television event that celebrates all of the movies most people never saw.
What does that leave us? More sports? There’s the Final Four, the World Series, the NBA playoffs, the Masters, the US Open, which will all draw a decent audience but will each fail to become a seminal television event simply because of the number of games. The NFL is perfectly marketed because its so scarce. Sixteen regular season games and three playoff wins. That’s all there is before a champion is crowned. This, coupled with violence, beer advertising and not-so-lazy Sundays combine to make a perfect storm of television viewing. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why it’s called “The Super Bowl” why people say things like “yeah, it’s the Super Bowl of insurance adjuster conferences” because it’s just so damn big. The television audience (especially the network audience) will continue to dwindle as time goes on and as more and more options for entertainment become available, but as long as American’s enjoy the slow and deliberate movement of an oblong across a grass field, there is still the chance that nearly everyone with a television set will simultaneously tune into this one event each year possibly making it the Super Bowl of Super Bowls.
Tags: event, FOX, ratings, The Super Bowl
