TV REVIEW : ‘Nova’ Rates the Nielsen Ratings

The crack PBS science series “Nova” weighs in tonight with an informative hour that touches the very soul of America’s television system.

It airs at 8 on Channel 28, its title asking “Can You Believe TV Ratings?” The answer shortly.

The episode inexplicably omits mentioning the four-times-yearly ratings sweeps periods that are crucial for the setting of local commercial rates. Moreover, it sometimes sinks into a swamp of tedious statistics and technology.

Yet in peeling back at least some of the mystique from ratings, “Nova” achieves the improbable. It wittily explores the effect of ratings on a single series, using ABC’s short-lived “Good & Evil” as an example.

Its definition of the people meter system--which requires each member of an A. C. Nielsen Co. household (there are 4,000 in the national sample) to punch in an individual code in advance of watching--is cogent and understandable. And so is its explanation of the ratings system’s potential flaws, including the Nielsen company’s alleged inadvertent skewing of its own sample.

Installed in the late 1980s in place of the old audimeter/diary system, the people meters are aimed at giving advertisers information about the composition of a program’s audience as well as its size. However, the program notes that the validity of the people meters may be undermined by button fatigue, particularly on the part of younger and female viewers.

Not to worry, though. In an Orwellian twist, researchers are said to be working on a new system that, in effect, would take the “people” out of the manually operated people meters by scanning the room to determine which members of the Nielsen household are actually watching.

Of course, the type of people who would accept this potentially snooping technology into their homes may not be representative of the nation, thus skewing the ratings further.

Now for an answer to the question: Can you believe in TV ratings?

Omitting the Nielsen company--it’s the one selling this system to the networks, after all--the consensus tonight seems to be that you can’t believe them, and everyone in broadcasting and advertising knows it. However, there’s also a consensus that the ratings will be around for awhile just the same.

Yes, it’s crazy.

You want logic? Find another industry.