But 2013 brought NBC a huge quintuple-whammy: 1) Go On completely melted down without the support of its fall lead-in The Voice; 2) 1600 Penn looked weak in its Thursday debut and was pretty clearly dunzo by week two; 3) Deception, after at least a somewhat reasonable start, was essentially done for by week three; 4) Do No Harm had the lowest-rated big four scripted premiere ever; and 5) Robert Greenblatt's pet project Smash bombed out of the gate in its second season premiere. Barely two months removed from their November sweeps victory, a Vulture post asks: "Has NBC Passed the Point of No Return?"
Two months ago, NBC was back. Now they're so not back that they're actually beyond saving! How could it have changed so quickly?!
Short answer: it didn't. They were never back, and they're still not beyond repair. Here's the long answer.
The Extent of the Collapse
The aforementioned quintuple-whammy plus the absence of The Voice have shown up in NBC's averages in a meaningful way. Here are the relative entertainment averages from when I last looked at the network shifts (week 7), after The Voice's finale (week 13), and now, a little less than halfway through The Voice's hiatus:
| Week | ABC | CBS | NBC | Fox | CW |
| 7 | 94 | 105 | 105 | 93 | 29 |
| 13 | 91 | 108 | 105 | 93 | 30 |
| 19 | 92 | 110 | 98 | 99 | 29 |
So these last six weeks have clearly been pretty brutal. NBC is no longer a "league-average" network. Earlier in week 19, they dropped from second to third in original entertainment average; Fox has added eight points in A18-49+ in the four weeks since American Idol showed up. At this point, it'd probably be an upset if NBC is not back in fourth place in entertainment average by the time The Voice comes back. (Though I can't rule out them passing ABC again in the late spring.) They've lost two points each of the last three weeks while ABC has held right around 92.
In the overall numbers (including sports), NBC's of course stronger. But on Super Bowl Sunday, they lost their grip on #1 in the overall Live+SD 18-49 averages, and they also lost virtually all of that much-ballyhooed year-to-year growth from the fall. (To be fair, you could argue that being even year-to-year despite losing the Super Bowl is still pretty impressive.) They may later fall behind Fox to move into third in overall averages, too.
What Does The Quintuple-Whammy Mean?
In week seven, I advised not to overreact to the enticing numbers suggesting NBC was "back." You didn't have to be a prophet to see that NBC was getting a monstrous boost from The Voice. It was responsible for almost all of their year-to-year growth as well as their competitiveness in entertainment averages. The NBC of the first 13 weeks was never going to be the NBC of the next 13.
Now I guess I'm on the other side of the argument. If it was unfair to stage an NBC coronation based on the first three months of the season, it's also unfair to pretend they never happened. The real question about NBC's 2013 is whether all these disappointments have actually meaningfully cut into the gains they made in the fall. Do we actually know something about NBC that we didn't know coming into 2013?
To return to NBC's quintuple-whammy:
The flops of Deception, 1600 Penn and Do No Harm. Yeah, it sucks that all three new shows were disasters. But it's hard to feel that their failures were real game-changers. They were held for midseason for a reason, and it's not like any of them really built up any kind of hype. 1600 Penn and Do No Harm were scheduled on NBC's weakest night, so they were basically doomed from the get-go. I had a little more hope for Deception because I liked the cast and timeslot, but I'd lost interest within a few weeks.
The collapses of Go On and Smash. These are much higher-profile failures. Go On has a former Friend and was supposedly NBC's favorite pilot of the 2012-13 crop, and it shed about a full point when The Voice was gone. Smash had a 15-episode season after The Voice and was only able to turn that into a 1.2 for the second season premiere.
Are they surprising failures? Late last season, I thought Smash "deserved" renewal, but I also acknowledged that I wasn't sure where it could be scheduled in a favorable way for the network. I expected it'd be a bubble show at best this season. So maybe that means it never really "deserved" the renewal. Many were convinced the Go On of the fall was something like a modest success, and those people might argue that its collapse has taken something meaningful away from NBC's fall. Though I did expect it'd be doing a little better than this without The Voice, I always thought "modest success" was too strong. So I tend to think these shows' failures have more of an impact on PR than on the network's actual strength as a whole.
Combining Fall and Winter
It's fair to say that NBC looks weaker now than at the beginning of 2013. Even if most of what happened is far from a shock, it still happened. I don't mean to minimize a bunch of shows flopping in succession. That's a lot of money down the tubes. But how much does it take away from what was accomplished in the fall? If we combine the fall and the winter, is NBC having a good season or a bad season?
I still say good, and likely still the best relative to last May of any big four network. (Though this is not saying much.) The "beyond repair" network has actually made repairs relative to where they were at the 2012 upfront; even if Revolution turns out to be as much of a fraud as Go On and Smash, Chicago Fire still looks like a definite keeper. The Voice itself has been a major repair compared to where NBC was before its premiere in early 2011.
Perhaps the fall schedule was an illusion, but so is the midseason schedule. Keep in mind we're not just in a football/Voice hiatus. The network isn't currently airing five of their strongest series: Sunday Night Football, The Voice, Revolution, Grimm and Parenthood. You can throw out a huge portion of what's airing right now and still work up a fall sked with fewer holes than some of their past efforts.
Basically, the point here is to not get too high or too low. Don't crown NBC while they're airing an inflated fall schedule, and don't bury them while they're airing a deflated January/February schedule. There are some signs that they might be kind of on the way back. There are some signs that they're a very long way from actually being there. The reality is complicated.
Week-by-week:
| Week | Ending | TPUT | y2y | bc | y2y | LeAv | y2y |
| 15 | 1/6/2013 | 34.2 | -4% | 7.1 | -18% | 1.90 | -18% |
| 16 | 1/13/2013 | 34.6 | -4% | 8.7 | -10% | 2.01 | -8% |
| 17 | 1/20/2013 | 34.5 | -7% | 8.8 | -19% | 2.25 | -11% |
| 18 | 1/27/2013 | 34.6 | -2% | 7.2 | -6% | 2.25 | -8% |
| 19 | 2/3/2013 | 36.1 | +1% | 12.1 | +4% | 2.32 | -11% |
Season-to-date:
| Week | Ending | TPUTy2d | y2dy2y | bcy2d | y2dy2y | LAy2d | y2dy2y |
| 1 | 9/30/2012 | 32.4 | -6% | 9.2 | -16% | 2.50 | -15% |
| 5 | 10/28/2012 | 33.3 | -3% | 8.8 | -10% | 2.31 | -13% |
| 9 | 11/25/2012 | 33.5 | -3% | 8.8 | -9% | 2.26 | -12% |
| 13 | 12/23/2012 | 33.4 | -2% | 8.5 | -6% | 2.24 | -10% |
| 17 | 1/20/2013 | 33.4 | -3% | 8.3 | -8% | 2.20 | -10% |
| 18 | 1/27/2013 | 33.5 | -3% | 8.2 | -8% | 2.21 | -10% |
| 19 | 2/3/2013 | 33.6 | -2% | 8.4 | -7% | 2.21 | -10% |
As always, Super Bowl week was the most broadcast-viewed week of the year. This particular week got a big boost from the long-running Super Bowl, creating massive numbers in a 10:00 hour usually dedicated to post-game coverage and the lead-out program.
The league average has continued to hover in the general vicinity of the season-to-date -10% in recent weeks. This is likely to worsen, maybe to a large extent, in the coming weeks; we've already seen American Idol take hits on both nights in week 20, and NBC's Biggest Loser/Deception Monday will start getting compared against The Voice and Smash at their peaks.
Click to expand for more on the "climate" numbers used herein.
TPUT - This is an ESTIMATED average of how many people are watching TV from 8:00 to 11:00.
- I derive these numbers by adding up all the ratings and dividing by all the shares in each of the 42 half-hours each week. That means there is some error relative to the numbers Nielsen actually releases. Sadly we don't regularly have access to those. I always advise not to rely heavily on these numbers for any one show in any one week, but the hope is that the error is minimized across a 42-timeslot sample every week.
- I include the Old Methodology adjustment, which makes the number more like a measurement of how many people watch primetime programming Live + SD, rather than a measurement of how many people watch any TV (including old DVR stuff) from 8:00 to 11:00. This makes the number perhaps less intuitive in a vacuum, but it's pretty much a wash when making week-to-week and year-to-year comparisons, which is what we're really interested in.
- This does NOT include the 10:00 adjustment used in the True2 calculation which attempts to account for Fox/CW programming and stronger cable. Again, that perhaps hurts the number in a vacuum, because the 10:00 numbers being used only include three networks, so I'm averaging timeslots that are somewhat apples-to-oranges. But again, it's a wash when making comparisons because I treat it that way all the time. It would not really change week-to-week or year-to-year comparisons, and that's what I mostly care about.
- Another important note here is that these numbers include the preliminary averages for "sustaining" programming like presidential debates and commercial-free benefit concerts whose numbers are typically omitted from traditional Nielsen averages. I might eventually omit these from this particular calculation, but they're needed on my spreadsheets to 1) make PUT calculations in those timeslots and 2) create a competition number for the entertainment shows that air against them.
Note: Beginning with week 9, all numbers compare against the next numbered week in the 2011-12 season. So week 9 compares against week 10 of 2011-12, etc. This was done to make the comparisons more calendar-friendly. See here for more on that.
