from the TV Barn archives
Click here to return to the home page.

The latest ratings

Back when it really seemed to matter — or back when David Letterman was whupping some "Tonight Show" butt, take your pick — TV Barn's predecessor Late Show News never missed an opportunity to pass the latest Nielsen ratings along. It was a pleasure.

Six years ago, "Late Show with David Letterman" won the 1993-94 season by averaging a 5.8 Nielsen rating and astonishing 18 share in late night. (A rating point represented about 950,000 American households back then; a share point, as always, is 1 percent of those watching TV at that hour.) Ted Koppel's "Nightline" was second with a 4.9 rating/14 share, and Jay Leno "was the show horse, for the first time ever, at 4.4 rating/13 share," I wrote.

The tables turned, as we all know, a year later, and by the middle of 1996 Leno had put a fairly wide margin between himself and Letterman in total viewers and key demographics. By the spring of 1998, with "Seinfeld" and "ER" delivering murderous ratings to NBC on Thursdays, the "Tonight Show" was delivering its highest numbers since 1989 — when Johnny Carson was host and the late-night scene was a lot less competitive.

By the end of the 1998-99 season, Letterman had sunk to half his Nielsen peak with a lowly 2.9 Nielsen average. Leno — and network late night generally — had cooled as well.

But now, there are signs that Letterman is making a charge again. Two unexpected events this year — Dave's heart surgery and the huge success of "Survivor" — have driven viewers back to "Late Show." There they are discovering that the show's a lot better than the sorry, self-absorbed fiasco of a couple years back. It's essentially the same thing the Hugh Grant arrest did five years ago for Leno and the "Tonight Show."

As a result, "Late Show" is up more than 10 percent compared with a year ago, back to a 3.2 average. Leno, meanwhile, is nearly back where he was in '94, averaging a 4.5 rating/13 share. And if Letterman keeps having weeks like last week's — a 3.4 average with a 4.1 rating on "Survivor" Wednesday, tying Leno's household rating, then this could be a very interesting race indeed.

Small wonder, then, that Letterman was on the phone with CBS West Coast executives in recent days, lobbying them to put "Survivor II" on in a later time period next February, as Bill Carter reported in the New York Times. Small wonder that CBS News informed its affiliates, prior to its Wednesday broadcast of Dick Cheney's speech from the Republican convention, that the telecast would wrap at 11 p.m. sharp — regardless of whether the nominee was still speaking.

"'LATE SHOW WITH David Letterman' will start on time at 11:35:00PM CNYT/CPT," the memo continued. "So those stations electing to stay with anchored network coverage will have to truncate their local news broadcasts."

All of which acknowledges a sad fact: No matter how good or awful you think their shows are, Leno, Letterman and Koppel owe a fair share of their success to carrying as much of their respective networks' prime time audience into late night as possible.

But Letterman's rise was in the works well before most of America knew someone named Gervase. And that is the flip side of the coin. No matter how powerful a lead-in the network supplies, if the show isn't worth watching, the lead-in will go elsewhere. That's why David Letterman is on the way back up: He's got a show worth watching.

For a couple of years there, I wasn't remotely interested in what might be on that night's "Late Show." Now I find myself tuning in again just to see what they've got planned tonight: maybe a group of girls in the balcony who will scream in mock ecstasy every time the name "Dick Cheney" is spoken. Or something inspired from Paul Shaffer and the band, like the recent moment when they played out British newsreader Daljit Dhaliwal to the tune of "Feliz Navidad" (think about it). Or what's in store tonight on "Campaign 2000," if nothing else to hear those ridiculous sponsor tags read by Alan Kalter ("meeeooooooowwww!").

Of course, this could all be fleeting, like many summer flings are. "Survivor" will be gone in three weeks, and soon it will be back to "baby boomer" programs on CBS, watched mainly by 50-plus viewers, not the younger audiences who stay up late and keep "Late Show" and "Tonight Show" on the air.

In other fringe news, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" is having a good summer. Its ratings were up 9 percent last week compared with a year ago. "Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn" is up in households, too, though in key demographics it trails "Late Night" by as much as 2-to-1.

Pick to click

Cable seems to be full of shows like "Courage," which debuts at 9 p.m. tonight on Fox Family Channel. It's a slickly produced program filled with portraits of heroic real-life people. And yet, you can't stop watching these things. Danny Glover is not only the host and narrator of ``Courage'' but the show's executive producer. Tonight: A 11-year-old double amputee who runs a 7:20 mile on artificial limbs, a medic whose almost unbelievable heroism in the Vietnam War is only being recognized now, and others.

New episodes of "Courage" will air through Thursday at 9 p.m., then weekly at 9 p.m. Mondays beginning Aug. 12 on Fox Family Channel.

On this date...

in 1981, already a sensation in Great Britain, "television's toughest quiz show" — "The Krypton Factor" — is ready to vex American contestants for five weeks on ABC. Sound familiar? But the Dick Clark-hosted series uses everything from memory tests and trivia to various athletic endeavors in order to test mental agility, response, observation, physical ability ... and intelligence. "The Krypton Factor" will soon be returning to American airwaves on the Fox network with host Pat O'Brien. -- Tom Heald

Previously at TV Barn:

 

More news you can use

Copyright © 1999-2001 Aaron Barnhart | Back to TV Barn home