Fox Crows Over Sunday-Night Ratings

The upstart “fourth network,” Fox Broadcasting Co., is beginning to catch on in a big--and, more importantly--profitable way.

Its Sunday-night ratings are up 45% from a year ago and registered their highest levels last weekend, network executives report. And Fox scored a minor ratings coup by outperforming ABC in the 8-9 p.m. time slot Sunday, as both “America’s Most Wanted” and “Married . . . With Children” drew larger audiences than ABC’s revival of “Mission: Impossible.”

“We believed from the beginning we would begin to break through, and it looks like we have,” Jamie Kellner, president and chief operating officer of Fox Broadcasting, said in an interview Wednesday.

And while some industry observers dismissed the narrow win over ABC for one hour as insignificant, they were more respectful of Fox’s recent ratings spurt.

“I think there’s a little gamesmanship going on in (Fox’s announcement Tuesday) of winning a time period over ABC,” said David Poltrack, senior vice president of planning and research in the CBS marketing division. “I think what’s probably more meaningful is that, at those ratings levels, the shows are probably profitable. They are profitable and viable-- that is more significant.”

Edward Hatch, media analyst at Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, called the 10 ratings that Fox got with “America’s Most Wanted” and “Married . . . With Children”--each show’s highest ratings to date--”a very credible result.”

“It goes hand in hand that those types of ratings become very attractive to advertisers and certainly will increase Fox’s revenue base,” he said.

In addition to the strong performance from 8 to 9 p.m., Fox’s “21 Jump Street” registered its second-best ratings from 7 to 8 p.m. Sunday, garnering an 8.1 and 12% of the audience. Each ratings point represents 904,000 homes.

Other Fox shows fared less well: Ratings for the other Sunday night shows--”It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” “Duet” and “The Tracey Ullman Show”--fell below 6 last week, and Saturday night’s programs--”The Reporters” and “Beyond Tomorrow”--were even lower.

NBC research vice president Bill Rubens said that even though Fox has boosted its overall share of the prime-time weekend audience from 7% to 10% in the last year, it still poses no threat to the three major networks.

“Per week, they take seven-tenths of a ratings point away from the networks. The total effect on the networks is very small,” he said.

Rubens called Fox’s win over ABC Sunday a fluke. “ ‘Mission: Impossible’ was really a creation of the writers’ strike,” he said, referring to the fact that it is on ABC’s schedule only as a substitute for programming that was delayed by last summer’s work stoppage by the Writers Guild of America. “It really would not have been in that time period” under ordinary circumstances, he added.

CBS’ Poltrack said that Fox has profited from both summer reruns and strike-related delays in new fall programming on the networks. Even though Fox was also in reruns during summer and early fall, he explained, many viewers rejected the network reruns to see the shows they had missed on Fox during the regular TV season.

Andy Fessel, vice president of research and marketing at Fox Broadcasting, said Fox also has benefited recently from “churn,” an industry term for what happens when households that subscribe to cable become disappointed by what’s offered and cancel the service. He said some of those viewers, still dissatisfied with Big Three network offerings, have turned to Fox.

Kellner attributed the network’s improved performance to the growing strength of its affiliated stations across the country. “Over a period of time, with high quality shows, people go back to a station and begin to make it part of their mainstream viewing,” he said.

Kellner said it is only a matter of time before Fox’s newer Saturday programming catches up with Sunday’s, predicting it would take between four and six months. He added that Fox expects to roll out its third night of programminng next June.

Kellner bristled when asked about the fact that much of Fox’s success is based on the popularity of “America’s Most Wanted,” a show that reenacts real-life crimes and has been labeled “tabloid TV” by some critics.

“I think that show clearly has nothing to do with tabloid,” he said. “It is a franchise. You wouldn’t call the Wanted posters in a post office a ‘tabloid.’ I think this show clearly provides a public service.”