2 New Players Upset the Sweeps

The February rating sweeps don’t officially start until next week, but officials at CBS--hardly known for their lack of competitive zeal--have already conceded that NBC will emerge victorious, while Fox seems destined to achieve significant gains versus the 2001 survey period.

These are hardly bold predictions, given that NBC will broadcast the Winter Olympics and Fox will telecast Super Bowl XXXVI, which was pushed into sweeps after the football season was amended by the events of Sept. 11.

Yet what could be the most meaningless and least suspenseful sweeps competition in memory could actually benefit viewers, breaking up the usual logjam of high-profile programming and resulting in fewer reruns through the remainder of the television season.

An odd confluence of factors has played havoc with network scheduling plans this season, as September’s terrorist attacks and related news coverage delayed numerous series premieres. Fallout from the attacks also rewrote sports schedules, postponing both the baseball playoffs by a week and the Super Bowl, traditionally the year’s most-watched event, until Feb. 3.

Combined with the Olympics, which take over NBC’s prime-time schedule for 17 consecutive days beginning Feb. 8, these shifts are creating an Olympian-size ripple effect through prime time. And while the other networks’ strategies to counterpunch the Games will bring about a less flamboyant February, they will also make available more new episodes of favorite series for March and April, when broadcast networks have traditionally tossed in reruns to stockpile fresh installments for May, another of the three four-week sweeps (the other major one comes in November) conducted each year.

NBC, for example, will have nothing but original episodes of its series “Providence,” “Ed,” “Third Watch” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” to run from the end of the Olympics straight through the May sweeps, before summer reruns take over.

As a result, having the Olympics is “like a gift,” said Mitch Metcalf, NBC’s senior vice president of program planning and scheduling, “because in a typical season, we’re faced with that horrible proposition of spreading 22 or 24 originals [of an average series] over 35 weeks.... It improves the math, and the need to stretch those episodes.”

Anticipating that the Olympics will siphon away potential viewers, the other networks are trying to put up some resistance without squandering their own precious programming resources, in what one executive referred to as a “rope-a-dope” strategy.

CBS, for example, is squirreling away episodes of certain programs as opposed to forcing them to compete with the Olympics, instead scheduling a variety of movies and miniseries, including “The Rosa Parks Story,” a “Diagnosis Murder” movie and such feature films as “The Fugitive,” “Sabrina,” “Primal Fear” and “Breakdown.”

ABC will stunt with extra reruns of comedies such as “My Wife and Kids,” starring Damon Wayans, which the network will run on five consecutive nights the week of Feb. 18, along with other sitcoms. ABC will also air “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and its sequel “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” versus the Games.

New Episodes on Tap After Late Premieres

Fox, meanwhile, intends to offer a higher concentration of new episodes, in part because the network didn’t premiere several series until November due to its coverage of the baseball playoffs and World Series. In addition, the Olympics historically fare worst among young men, a core component of the Fox audience, suggesting that the network may be best positioned to weather the storm.

That said, even Fox officials aren’t diminishing the impact of Games held on U.S. soil amid a possible wave of patriotism. “Certainly we make no bones about the fact that we anticipate the Olympics will be a heavy-duty powerhouse hit to us,” Fox Entertainment Group President Gail Berman said earlier this month.

On the plus side, competitors are also conserving episodes during February, meaning they will schedule fewer reruns themselves during the spring. CBS also closes February with two significant ratings draws after the Olympics, broadcasting the Grammy Awards and launching the fourth edition of “Survivor.”

Network programmers have long lamented the tyranny of sweeps, a ritual staged for the benefit of local television stations in more than 200 U.S. markets, which rely on results from those periods to set advertising rates. “The amount of energy that gets focused into those 12 weeks is crazy,” NBC’s Metcalf noted.

Lacking a viable alternative for measuring local ratings, however, the networks are compelled to roll out major specials and key episodes of top-rated series to lure viewers to their affiliates during those months. Although more than 50 major cities--including Los Angeles--are monitored daily by ratings service Nielsen Media Research, local broadcasters still count on sweeps for vital demographic data sought by advertisers.

Because the Olympics and Super Bowl are virtually guaranteed to dominate 18 out of 28 days of the survey, coming to any true competitive assessment of next month’s sweeps will be difficult, if not impossible. Ratings for local newscasts on NBC stations will doubtless be inflated, at least in part at the expense of rival affiliates.

“It’s a leap to pretend any sweeps is indicative of an average week during the season, and this sweeps even more so,” said Kelly Kahl, CBS’ executive vice president of program planning and scheduling. “There are only [less than half] the nights that aren’t affected. I think you’re challenged to draw any kind of meaningful numbers out of that.”

As with past Winter Games, Nielsen will offer clients two sets of results from the sweeps, including an “Olympic exclusion report” providing averages for only those days that don’t coincide with the Olympics. With advertising revenues already down due to the sluggish economy, competing stations acknowledge that the Olympics make what has been an uphill struggle more severe.

Still, Arnold Kleiner, general manager of KABC-TV, stressed that his station isn’t cutting back on spending or “throwing in the towel” in February. As for making excuses about the Games skewing sweeps averages in KNBC’s favor, he said, “If I had the Olympics, I’d say, ‘Tough, that’s the way it is.’”