Who Says Numbers Don’t Lie?

Note: No math skills are necessary for enjoying the following. Honest.

Although the television industry seemingly finds some new award to hand out nearly every week celebrating artistic merit or lauding one of its own as a humanitarian, let’s face it: TV ultimately boils down to raw numbers.

Programs (and the careers tied to them) rise and fall based on ratings. Producers turn out 13 episodes of a series, then wait anxiously to see if “the numbers” justify the network’s ordering nine more. If a series runs long enough, it eventually hits the magic 100 installments needed to go into syndication, which is when the numbers following the dollar signs get really, really BIG. This is good news not only for producers and TV executives but also for real estate agents, luxury car dealerships and other sellers of ostentatious status symbols.

Heightened emphasis on audience demographics--not just how many people are watching but who they are--has only added to the dizzying amount of data swirling through the media. Number crunchers at the major networks work overtime splicing and dicing ratings a dozen ways--from viewers age 18 through 49 to women 25 through 54 to nearsighted, high-income teenagers of European descent with one leg shorter than the other--until everyone can claim victory somewhere.

You can have a lot of fun playing around with these numbers, largely because many of them, at first glance, make so little sense. ABC, for example, averaged 13.2 million viewers in prime time during the recently concluded February sweeps. Determined to improve on that performance, the network’s parent, Disney, subsequently placed ABC under the stewardship of Steve Bornstein, president of the Disney-owned cable network ESPN, which during that same sweeps period brought in 874,000 viewers.

In similar fashion, higher-ups at Fox decided the network needed new leadership back in November, when Fox recorded 12 million viewers. Its choice? Doug Herzog, the former head of Comedy Central, which delivered fewer than 500,000 viewers the same month. And NBC last week named Garth Ancier its new programming chief, even though NBC regularly draws an audience nearly three times as big as the audience of Ancier’s last place of employment, the WB network.

This is not to sell cable or the WB short. The major networks have clearly seen their share of audience slide since their heyday in the early 1970s, when the “Big Three” enjoyed a near-monopoly and commanded more than 90% of the available viewing audience.

Today, with Fox included, the “Big Four’s” share has sunk to 56% of prime-time viewing, a drop attributable in large part to competition from cable and upstart networks. These options have nibbled away at the big guys, with most viewers receiving nearly four dozen channels thanks to the cable wires or satellite dishes that serve roughly three-quarters of U.S. homes.

Unfortunately, these often-cited statistics ignore a simple fact: People don’t watch “cable.” They watch programs. And when it comes to the gee-whiz really BIG numbers television generates, the major networks continue to possess what amounts to a monopoly, while cable’s highlights are usually more collective--think army ants swarming over an iguana--than individual. Consider the following:

* A whopping 84 million viewers sat through this year’s Super Bowl. Ten months ago, more than 76 million watched (and, by most accounts, were singularly unimpressed by) the one-hour “Seinfeld” finale. Forty-nine million people tuned in for ABC’s recent Monica Lewinsky interview, and 98% of them probably knew what “phone sex” is, meaning they are smarter than Barbara Walters.

* Nielsen Media Research estimates 78 million people watched at least part of Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast on ABC. If every one of those viewers actually bought a movie ticket at $4.70, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s estimate of the average ticket price in 1998, the return (about $367 million) would exceed the two top-grossing films released last year, “Saving Private Ryan” and “Armageddon.” The networks only recently began publicly noting this “we serve more people” equation, perhaps because so many television people not-so-secretly yearn to make their own perilous leaps to the big screen.

* The audience that watched ABC on Sunday easily surpassed the combined audience viewing the 42 top national cable networks nightly during the February sweeps.

* In another factoid from February, even UPN--least-watched of the six broadcast networks and the butt of many a joke at well-trafficked Hollywood eateries--surpassed the most popular cable channel, the USA network, whose top-rated program was wrestling.

* NBC, the No. 1 network during February, averaged 14.6 million viewers in prime time, attracting more people than the total assembled by the top seven cable networks.

* The aggregate prime-time audience for ESPN and ESPN2 during February totaled 1.26 million viewers. If ABC was viewed by that many people during a single half-hour, let alone an entire month, all its programming executives would be fired between the time Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner saw the ratings and the crumpled paper they were printed on hit the floor.

* ESPN agreed to pay $4.8 billion last year for rights to NFL football over eight seasons. ABC, CBS and

Fox are all paying less, even though they draw bigger audiences with their telecasts than ESPN normally does with “Sunday Night Football.”

* ESPN can afford to be more generous because the channel earns an enormous profit, in the last few years tallying several hundred million dollars annually, and ABC, CBS and Fox don’t. This is because all those folks who aren’t watching ESPN with much regularity still pay their cable companies for the privilege, and cable operators return cash to ESPN for each subscriber. Of the six broadcast network operations, only NBC will show a profit this year, meaning that programmers reaching far more people than ESPN are making way less money.

Is this a great country, or what?

If all these numbers have left your head spinning, they can best be simplified by viewing them this way: It’s been said there are lies, damn lies and statistics. In television, there are effective manipulators of statistics and people who are either looking for new jobs or soon will be.

By the way, there are 1,102 words in this column, and you get them all for a mere 25 cents. We’d tell you how many words that is per penny, but that would be a shameless manipulation of statistics, and we did promise at the outset that there would be no math.