Broadcast ratings tumble without scripted programming

There were some genuine bright spots during a very weird fall on broadcast TV: The Golden Bachelor was a true breakout for ABC. NCIS: Sydney extended the CBS franchise all the way across the Pacific and is the most-watched entertainment program of the fall. NBC‘s first-year dramas Found and The Irrational found some traction and earned second-season pickups, and network fixtures like Survivor (CBS), The Voice (NBC) and Dancing With the Stars — back on ABC after a year as a Disney+ exclusive — continued to draw viewers.

But that’s about it. For the second time in the past four years, broadcasters faced major disruptions to their fall lineups and had to make patchwork schedules that scarcely resembled what they usually air. In 2020, the disruption was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which idled productions for months and made filming more time-consuming once safety protocols were in place.

This year, the wound to the network business was self-inflicted: Labor strikes that began in May (the Writers Guild of America) and July (SAG-AFTRA) stretched for months — and ended with the media companies that own the big four networks acceding to most of the contract demands the two unions had made from the start. Writers went back to work in late September, and actors followed in November, precluding any chance of getting network favorites like Abbott Elementary, Young Sheldon and Chicago Fire back on the air before 2024.

ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC likely missed out on airing more than 200 episodes of scripted series in the fall, and in a lot of cases, what aired in place of those missing shows fell short of the ratings scripted shows generate.

On the surface, ABC and NBC are in the best shape after the fall: ABC is the only network to improve year to year, while NBC is off by about 4 percent in total viewers and adults 18-49 and by about 7 percent adults 25-54. Both networks, however, got there with a heavy dose of primetime football. ABC aired a full season’s worth of Monday Night Football alongside ESPN, averaging better than 10 million viewers for its telecasts — more than double ABC’s seven-day average of 4.13 million viewers for Monday nights last fall. (All ratings figures cited in this story are through Dec. 10 and don’t include streaming.)

NBC’s Sunday Night Football, meanwhile, is averaging about 19.6 million viewers per game since the official start of the broadcast season, up 10 percent over the same point a year ago. A full slate of Big Ten and Notre Dame football games on Saturday nights also improved that night by more than a million viewers year to year.

CBS and Fox, which don’t have weekly primetime NFL games, have slipped by 32 percent and 26 percent in total viewers vs. last fall, and they’ve lost double-digit percentages among adults 18-49 and 25-54 as well.

Primetime ratings that exclude news and sports, meanwhile, paint a darker picture. ABC goes from up by about 15 percent among all viewers to down by 6 percent (with the aforementioned Golden Bachelor and Dancing With the Stars helping avoid a bigger slide). NBC is off by 15 percent, and CBS and Fox each fall by more than a third year to year.

CBS has suffered the most, as it relies more on comedies and dramas than any of its fellow broadcasters. The network unveiled a business-as-usual schedule in May before having to tear that up and fill in with unscripted shows, reruns and imports from both its Paramount Global brethren (Yellowstone and SEAL Team) and overseas (the British version of Ghosts). Assuming CBS would have scheduled its original lineup in much the same way it did in fall 2022, the network lost about 130 episodes of original scripted series in the fall — a huge reason for its 37 percent drop in viewers for its entertainment programming.

At Fox, an all-unscripted weekday lineup brought in diminishing returns, even compared to other unscripted shows last season. Snake Oil — the network’s Shark Tank-but-some of it’s fake game show — falls 11 percent behind the performance of Lego Masters last season in the Wednesday spot following The Masked Singer (which is itself down 16 percent in viewers from the fall 2022 edition). And while it was never likely that the return of Kitchen Nightmares would come close to matching the performance of Fox’s top drama last season, 911, Fox had to be hoping for better than a 73 percent drop-off in viewers (2.05 million for Kitchen Nightmares vs. 7.47 million for 911 — which, incidentally, is moving to ABC in the spring).

Even in places where fill-in programming performed reasonably well, the gaps are noticeable. Episodes from early seasons of Paramount Network’s Yellowstone have averaged 4.85 million viewers over seven days for CBS, ranking fifth among all scripted offerings on the networks in the fall. Yet that’s still 45 percent less than what The Equalizer averaged (8.83 million viewers) following 60 Minutes last fall.

Similarly, NBC’s Quantum Leap update — which continued production after wrapping its first season and has had a full complement of episodes this fall — has held up reasonably well compared to last season. It averages 3.91 million viewers per episode over seven days, about 10 percent behind its performance last fall. But Quantum Leap is airing in the Wednesday time normally held by Chicago Med — which averaged almost 8.7 million viewers over seven days last fall.

If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that networks will be bringing back their usual scripted lineups during some of the heavier TV use months of the year — January and February are typically when scripted shows hit some of their highest marks of the year. Pent-up demand for returning favorites could lead to a spike in viewers, at least to start. But network viewing outside of live sports was already in a years-long decline as streaming became the default option for a plurality of TV users. The (welcome) return of a bunch of series won’t fully reverse that, nor will it make up for a mostly lost fall. Hollywood Reporter