Another new TV season is starting and it has me wondering: why do we still have TV seasons? What good reason is there for having an "off-season" from network programming? Perhaps I'm too much a product of the on-line, on-demand generation, but I just don't understand why we must have an "off-season" for television. I understand why it developed, but why hasn't a groundswell of support forced a change to a year-round format for the tv networks? Such a change would result in more viewers for them and more decent shows for us year-round. It's a win-win scenario.
The current format of fall and spring seasons, with breaks for winter holidays and summer, developed from two separate needs of the industry. The first was to maximize their audience per show. When there were only three major networks, larger audience shares mattered. Research showed the networks that December through January and June through August were prime times for family vacations. This meant less TV viewership as more people enjoyed the Great Outdoors. But with the advent of cable and dozens of competing networks, broadcasters are willing to settle for a much smaller piece of the viewership pie.
Even though there are still less viewers during these traditional vacation times, there's more than enough for the current needs of broadcasters. In fact, summer shows can now see numbers equaling those in the fall. Survivor is perhaps the best example of this. It debuted in May 2000 and changed the face of TV, propelling reality TV to the forefront of television development.
Survivor also shows us why the second reason for traditional seasons is irrelevant: ratings sweeps. In fact, the entire ratings system is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. It used to be a tremendous task to gather detailed information on television viewership. Nielson still relies primarily on families recording their viewing habits in diaries, an antiquated method easily replaced with a decent website. Tallying those results was as arduous as compiling census data by hand, so the detailed ratings for the major networks were only done twice a year -- November and May (more times were added later).
Even though the family viewing diary is still the de facto method of ratings data collection, the compiling of the data benefits from the computer revolution and no longer requires armies of census takers two complete the task. Therefore sweeps are really a ghost of a by-gone era. Advertisers pay attention all year long to shows and no longer rely on these key months to decide where to put their money.
TV broadcasters want viewers all year long. Ratings are available all year long. Advertisers want to make money all year long. Viewers want new shows all year long. Why then are we still in this archaic system? The only reason I can come up with is that no one has proposed something better. So here is my suggestion.
First, in order to fill an entire year on roughly the same budget(you can't expect the corporations to actually put out more money), the networks will have to cut back on the number of shows they produce. Also unscripted series would be more prominent (though this step seems to have happened enough over the last few years). Finally, shows should air in a rerun-less format(or more accurately, an immediate rerun format). This means running an entire series without reruns (as has been(nearly) done recently with such shows as 24 and Alias). Instead of weeks of traditional reruns, try rebroadcasts later in the week instead. This helps fill the schedule and insures maximum audiences for successful shows (Fox's 24 and WB's Easyview Sundays have employed this strategy successfully). Next you stagger the shows. Originally, Desperate Housewives and Alias were to share one time slot, but have staggered starts and no reruns in order to fit them both in one season. DH of course exploded into a monster hit and was expanded to fill the timeslot of the entire season, so Alias was bumped to a traditional timeslot of its own on a different night. Its understandable that ABC wanted to milk DH for all its worth, but it was still a good idea.
Run shows without traditional reruns, air them twice a week, and evenly space reality and scripted shows around the entire year. While networks adopting this strategy might see an initial drop in their traditional ratings, their yearly ad revenue would skyrocket, and they would quickly learn to disregard Nielson and its constrictive, antiquated ratings system.
