Televised Dance Competitions Cutting Into Ratings Circle

As a senior vice president for the world’s most prolific independent producer of sports programming, Barry Frank has been involved in his share of dog and pony shows. Literally. How else could he possibly hope to fill 5,000 hours of videotape each year?

But even Frank had cause to pause when someone suggested he cover the International Dance-Sport Championships last spring. “I thought maybe this was a bad dream or something,” he says.

And then the Nielsen numbers came in. Last July’s one-hour broadcast on NBC drew 6.6 million viewers--bettering the network’s normal performance for the last hour of Saturday’s prime-time schedule. So just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Frank’s Trans World International produced another one-hour dance competition for NBC last December--and that show did almost as well, finishing second in the ratings battle to CBS’ “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

“This is visually pretty exciting stuff,” Frank says. “And the ratings have proven it.”

Which is why NBC will return to the dance floor tonight--this time at 8, right in the heart of prime time--for the Latin DanceSport Championships. The invitational prize-money competition, which was taped in Las Vegas earlier this week, is hosted by Suzanne Somers.

Frank and Don Ohlmeyer, the former West Coast president of NBC and the man who agreed to bring competitive dancing to the network last summer, were pleasantly surprised by the show’s ratings success. But similar events have proven popular for years on PBS, where the ballroom dance championships have been among the most watched annual specials on public television since their debut 18 years ago.

“It had good ratings right out of the box,” said executive producer Aida Moreno of the ballroom dance championships. “That’s what got me the second season.”

PBS’ broadcast has its strongest appeal among older, affluent, well-educated women--a demographic NBC’s program appears to have captured as well. And that’s made other programmers take note: Cable networks A&E; and ESPN are now planning to air their own dance competitions this summer.

Tonight’s broadcast on NBC will focus on Latin dance, which is faster-paced and more physically demanding than most traditional forms of ballroom dancing.

“This is something that is a little bit closer to a ‘90s version of ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ This is the kind of dancing that people are doing in clubs around the country now,” Ohlmeyer says. “It’s something you can appreciate whether you’re a dance aficionado or not.”

Although competitive dancing has been around about a century, only in recent years has a groundswell of support begun building to have it added to the Olympic Games. The Switzerland-based International Dance Sport Federation, the governing body of the sport, received full recognition from the International Olympic Committee in 1997, the same year dance first appeared on the schedule at the World Games.

“I have always said ballroom dancing is a sport as much as it is an art,” Moreno says.

“This really gets back to the real essence of sport,” Ohlmeyer adds. “These are not highly paid professional athletes with a tremendous amount of support. These are people doing something that they love to do, and part of the dream that they have is to perhaps be part of making this an Olympic sport.”

* The Latin DanceSport Championships airs tonight at 8 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).