Let's try something new! Introducing "Five-Spots"

I've mentioned on a couple other occasions that the holy grail of this blog is some sort of "regular" format that lets me keep up with current events a little better. But my standards for this kind of thing have been too high to make it happen. I simply don't think there's a particularly effective way of making day-to-day Nielsen ratings all that interesting. And since this is a labor of love with a pretty insubstantial audience size, doing things I find interesting is high-priority. I applaud the TVByTheNumbers and TheLiveFeeds of the world for trying to make daily ratings interesting by putting such a massive focus on week-to-week fluctuations. I'm in no position to bash that approach from a business standpoint. But it doesn't change the fact that I personally don't find most of those fluctuations all that exciting or compelling, even for shows I really care about. I do the Demos Year-to-Year posts because I think they are a nice piece of context that nobody else looks at very consistently, but even those don't usually warrant much commentary or have much entertainment value on a daily basis. So I'm still unconvinced the nature of the beast really allows for what I want to do.

However, I do have an idea I want to try: break it down by week rather than by day.

Starting this week, I'm gonna try out some weekly posts that I'm calling "Five-Spots." These are five interesting things I've spotted each week in a few different areas. The idea is that by reading these three posts, you can learn everything that's important in the world of TV from the last week!

MONDAY - Scheduling Five-Spot: I'll take a quick look at five developments in the world of TV news, with a focus on network schedules. That includes premiere dates announced, back nines awarded, renewals, cancellations, etc. Perhaps the occasional bit of casting news, too. I easily accumulated five for the first Scheduling Five-Spot, which goes up momentarily, but I'm not sure there are actually gonna be five scheduling tidbits each week. May have to break some multi-part press releases apart, scrape the bottom of the barrel (like fairly minor casting info), or even just offer some unsolicited sked advice.

TUESDAY - Opinion Five-Spot: I'll take a quick look at five things I watched on TV this week that stood out to me. I've always wanted to write more about my feelings about shows, but I've never felt like my greatest strength was as a full-on reviewer/recapper. This may be a way for me to split the difference and write more about what I'm watching without turning into a generic TV reviews blarg.

WEDNESDAY - Ratings Five-Spot: I'll take a quick look at five notable things in the world of TV ratings. I think five per week will be possible without having to really scrape for stuff or leave big stuff out. I'm shelving this one till Wednesday since the last final ratings for a Monday to Sunday TV week don't come in until at least midday on Tuesday. This might be kinda awkward, since stuff from Monday will be at least a week old. I could do it based on preliminary numbers for the last few days, but that still makes cable numbers from Friday/Saturday/Sunday an issue.

For the first couple weeks, I'll just stick with these three and try to gauge what kind of time commitment that requires. Ideally I end up with a five-spot of Five-Spots, one for each weekday, but that could be a long way away if ever. I also might end up deciding the whole thing is pretty lame. We'll see.

Oh yeah, and just for reference, I'll color-code each "spot" with one of those three shades of blue in the above graphic and all over this blog's layout. The bright neon-ish blue will be for good news, the medium blue for "meh," and the dark for bad. You'll be able to tell whether it's "good news" mostly from what I write down, but just thought that might make the posts a little (in the words of NBC) "more colorful"!