Super Bowl Audience Game for ‘Survivor’

A Super Bowl that lived down to expectations still scored a key goal for CBS by providing a springboard to launch “Survivor: The Australian Outback,” which attracted an estimated 43.6 million viewers--the biggest audience for a program following the Super Bowl since a special episode of “Friends” in 1996.

Viewership of the Baltimore Ravens’ drubbing of the New York Giants declined by about 5% compared to a year ago--when St. Louis beat Tennessee on a down-to-the-last-play thriller--with 84.2 million people watching at any given minute, according to preliminary data from Nielsen Media Research.

A higher-than-usual percentage of those viewers hung around for the postgame show, which was viewed by more than 58 million people. The network attributes that in part to anticipation of the “Survivor” sequel.

Moreover, more than 70% of the postgame audience stayed around for the new “Survivor.” Going back to the late 1980s, only “Friends”--which will face off against “Survivor” beginning Thursday--has done a better job of retaining football viewers in terms of entertainment series broadcast after the Super Bowl.

While failing to reach the blockbuster heights achieved by the first “Survivor’s” finale, “Survivor II” far exceeded the average for programs televised after the game in the past decade. During that period, the Super Bowl averaged nearly 87 million viewers, 55.7 million people watched the postgame show and 29.6 million the program that followed--a 48% drop on average from the postgame audience.

Ratings for “Survivor” did diminish as the hour went on, which CBS blamed on the program’s late start time, which was 10:17 p.m. in the Eastern time zone. The network announced Monday that it will repeat the opening installment Wednesday at 8 p.m., seeking to expose the program to additional viewers before its Thursday-night debut.

CBS’ principal aim was to hook an audience on subsequent episodes of “Survivor.” The show, which has already completed filming, will gradually eliminate its 16 participants over 14 weeks, with the last standing claiming a $1-million prize. The adventure contest will air opposite “Friends” Thursdays, leading into “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the first-year drama that became a surprise hit for CBS on Friday nights.

An executive at a competing network said “Survivor’s” ratings were within research projections for the show, though shading toward the low end of the spectrum. The questions yet to be answered are how well “Survivor II” will perform against original-series programming, as opposed to reruns; if the characters in the new version can catch on in the same way the first cast did; and what impact CBS’ gambit will have on NBC’s historically dominant “Must-See TV” Thursday franchise.

Thursday marks the start of the four-week February rating sweeps, a period when networks try to boost ratings to benefit their affiliated and owned stations, which rely on sweeps results in setting local advertising rates. NBC will counter “Survivor” the first few weeks with extra-long, 40-minute episodes of “Friends,” followed by 20 minutes of live “Saturday Night Live” sketches.

The earlier “Survivor” averaged 51.7 million viewers with its concluding telecast in August, surpassing tune-in for any program last year except the Super Bowl and Academy Awards. The premiere drew 15.5 million viewers, steadily building to more than 28 million for the last few episodes prior to the media-hyped finale.

After historically using the Super Bowl as a platform to introduce programs--a strategy that generated mixed results, including such short-lived shows as “Extreme,” “Grand Slam” and “Davis Rules”--in the last half-dozen years, the networks have instead chosen to offer episodes of existing audience favorites, such as “Friends,” “The X-Files” and “The Practice.”

Nielsen estimates are based on measurable in-home viewing. The ratings service projects that 130 million people in the U.S. watched at least a portion of the game. Because of steady population growth, Super Bowl XXXV will thus rank among the 10 most-watched broadcasts of all time, despite a relatively low rating compared to previous Super Bowls in terms of the percentage of homes tuning in.

Locally, just under a third of households in the Los Angeles market--or roughly 1.8 million homes--watched this year’s Super Bowl, the lowest rating for the game in at least two decades. “Survivor” was viewed in 23.2% of homes in the area, or about 1.2 million households.

In the 49 major cities metered by Nielsen, the Super Bowl drew its highest ratings in the host city of Tampa, followed by Baltimore.

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How Do You Follow the Super Bowl?

(viewers in millions)

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Super Postgame % Drop Show % Drop Bowl Show From That Follows From Year Network Viewers Viewers Game Postgame Viewers Postgame 2001* CBS 84.2 58.1 31% “Survivor” 43.6 28% 2000 ABC 88.5 54.0 39% “The Practice” 23.8 56% 1999 Fox 83.7 47.6 43% “Family Guy” 22.0 54% 1998 NBC 90.0 64.8 28% “3rd Rock” 33.7 48% 1997 Fox 87.9 59.8 32% “X-Files” 29.1 51% 1996 NBC 94.1 69.9 26% “Friends” 52.9 24%

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Source: Nielsen Media Research

* Estimated based on preliminary data.