“We’ve got a stowaway, sir.” – Not Peter Lorre
“I’ll pay! How much?” – Dream Bart
“Twice the fare from Tucson to Flagstaff minus two-thirds of the fare from Albuquerque to El Paso!” – Dream Martin
I didn’t watch last week’s Zombie Simpsons episode; I did watch this week’s, but ran out of steam long before I could write a whole post about it. Long story short, “Cue Detective” has a meandering and incoherent story (that apparently involves alien technology that fell to Earth, but nevermind), lots of exposition to explain that story (plus whatever hapless jokes got stapled to it), and plenty of filler to take up those contractually obligated twenty minutes of airtime. If you haven’t seen it, you aren’t missing anything. If you have seen it, well, at least you don’t have to watch it again.
I do plan to get back to Behind Us Forever and Compare & Contrast posts, but my stupid real job has been eating all my time and energy. Un/fortunately, there are new episodes for at least the next three weeks, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities.
Before we get to the ratings for Zombie Simpsons, we should pause for a moment to note that network teevee, which has been ailing for a long time, may now be entering serious death throes:
Networks have always banked on Premiere Week as an interval of peak sampling, but Tuesday night’s PUT (or people using television) levels were discouraging. The number of adults 18-to-49 watching primep-time programming dropped 8% versus the year-ago period and overall usage in the demograhic for the last two nights is down 10%.
But the most disconcerting PUT data concerns younger viewers, who are ditching traditional TV faster than anyone could have anticipated. TV viewing among adults 18-to-24 is now down 20% versus the first two nights of the 2014-15 season, and male usage in that age range has withered by nearly a quarter (24%). While last fall was blighted by disappearing female viewers, this year it’s the menfolk who are pulling the old Invisible Man routine. Per Nielsen, male 18-to-34 PUT levels over the last two nights are down 18%.
First of all, AdAge, Jebus, run a spell checker. Second, if that’s the best the networks can do during premier week, before people even realize how crappy most of the shows are, you’ve got to start wondering if there will even be a premier week ten years from now. That’s a lot of valuable spectrum that’s not serving a whole lot of people, and advertisers seem to finally be getting sick of paying big bucks to reach a shrinking and difficult to measure audience. FOX has an option on Zombie Simpsons that goes through Season 30, I wonder if it’ll outlive its medium?
With that grave decline in overall network television audience in mind, let’s take a look at the numbers for Zombie Simpsons:
TV Ratings Sunday: ‘CSI’ Finale Up, ‘Once Upon A Time’ Down + ‘Quantico’ + ‘Last Man on Earth’ – “Every Man’s Dream” was swiftly forgotten by just 3.26 million viewers. That is very ungood. It took Season 26 until February to post a number lower than that, and premiers have been in the 6-8 million range the last few years, so that number is basically in freefall. Last year’s premier, which admittedly had a football lead-in, scored 8.50 million viewers, and was 3.9rating/11share among the nuts and gum set. This year was 1.5/5.
TV Ratings Sunday: ‘The Good Wife’ premieres lower, ‘Quantico’ holds in week 2 – “Cue Detective” had a football lead-in, and fared better than the premier, but still only had “6 million” (no decimals at the link) viewers. Football lead-ins last year were in the seven million range this early in the year, so that’s down too; and the nuts and gum numbers are 2.6/8, also down from last year’s first football lead-in.
Two data points do not make a trend, but things are looking grim for the numbers this year. Oh, and there’s no football lead-in this Sunday.
