February ‘sweep’ for Fox is Super

Back in the fall, Fox was in miserable shape, with postseason baseball its only saving grace in the ratings. But thanks to this year’s Super Bowl, not to mention the reality smash “American Idol,” Rupert Murdoch’s broadcast network has come roaring back to life.

For the February “sweep” -- one of the quarterly rating periods that help local stations determine ad rates -- Fox will crush rivals in both total viewers and adults ages 18 to 49, the demographic most important to advertisers.

Through Monday night, Fox had a sweep average of 15.4 million total prime time viewers, cruising past CBS (12.4 million), ABC (11.1 million) and NBC (10.3 million), according to figures from Nielsen Media Research. The sweep officially ends tonight, but the numbers are unlikely to change significantly. It will be Fox’s most dominant sweep victory since the network launched in 1986.

Fox’s telecast of the Feb. 6 Super Bowl, which averaged 86.1 million viewers, deserves much of the credit. Without the game, Fox would have logged 10.6 million average viewers per night and landed in third place behind CBS and ABC.

But “American Idol” has proven so potent among young adults that even without the Super Bowl, Fox would have won in that demographic category.

“We’re winning handily without [the Super Bowl] and winning extraordinarily well with it,” Fox entertainment president Gail Berman said in an interview Tuesday.

The good news comes just in time for Berman, whose job security was subject to the Hollywood rumor mill as recently as two months ago. Her contract is due to expire later this year.

Despite the sweep victory, Berman said she hasn’t forgotten about Fox’s lackluster summer and fall, when highly touted premieres such as the boxing show “Next Great Champ” and the reality contest “The Rebel Billionaire: Branson’s Quest for the Best” bombed. But she added that the network remained committed to its strategy, announced last year, of launching new shows continuously through the year, rather than in the fall and midwinter, as networks have done for decades.

“It’s my goal to figure it out,” Berman said, referring to the fall scheduling problems. “I believe the year-round strategy is the right one.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fox’s rivals downplayed the February results. ABC and CBS did not offer their traditional end-of-sweep phone conferences for reporters, and an NBC spokeswoman said the network was discontinuing such calls permanently.