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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
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Posted:
08:30:40 on September 17 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: TrekWeb Features
With the second season premiere just a day away, TrekWeb columnist and book reviewer Alexander Chase takes a look at the television landscape and the challenge for ENTERPRISE this year.
ENTERPRISE's 2nd Season Ratings Challenge
Written for TrekWeb by Alexander Chase, edited by Steve Krutzler
The ratings prowess of ENTERPRISE's first season was like having sex with
Bob Dole on his last dosage of Viagara; it started out with a bang and ended
with a whimper. In ENT's first season, "Broken Bow" premiered in late
September with the second highest ratings of the year for a science
fiction/fantasy genre network series; 12.5 million viewers watched ENT's
"Broken Bow", right behind the 15.0 million watching the premiere of ABC's
Alias. These numbers can be safely characterized as remarkable given the
diluting over the last decade of the networks' grasp on viewers and the fact
that both were new shows, much less (shock, horror) genre programming.
However, by May, ENT's audience numbers had fallen an amazing 57.6% and
only 5.3 million viewers watched the season finale, "Shockwave". Meanwhile,
ABC's Alias continued its domination from start-to-finish of the #1 slot in the
science fiction/fantasy genre while regularly reining in more than 10 million
viewers (not counting Emmy nominations). In contrast, by season's end ENT had
regularly fallen behind FOX's The X-Files and Dark Angel, and The WB's
critically-acclaimed Smallville. The worst for ENT came on February 27th when
some genius at UPN thought it would be a great idea to program a first-run
ENT episode opposite the women's figure skating competition of the Salt Lake
City Winter Olympics. Predictably, Sarah Hughes pounded ENT into the ground
with a triple toe loop as only 4.5 million viewers bothered to watch
"Fusion". Hey, even those of us who have been watching Star Trek for over 20
years were watching Sarah Hughes that night. However, to be fair, once
viewers actually got a glimpse of the episode "Fusion", it was clear the
schedulers at UPN were almost Machiavellian in their methods.
So, what do we see as we gaze across the new season of the network
landscape? The X-Files is gone. Dark Angel is gone. Roswell, you ask? Gone.
Wolf Lake? Blessedly gone as is the pathetic Glory Days. Even Farscape is
gone - more or less - though that is a completely different subject. So what
does the science fiction/fantasy fan have to look forward to this fall on
network television? Well, there's Haunted on UPN, a Sixth Sense rip-off
without the participation of either Bruce Willis or Hally Joel Osment. TV
Guide has already pronounced UPN’s Haunted as "humorless and a bit of a
drag"; presumably, they don't mean cross-dressing. Not your cup of tea? Then
how about The WB delving once more into the reimagined-comic-book-setting
vault with Birds of Prey; a sort of vagina-ized version of Batman? TV Guide
spews forth with the adjectives for this new show: dark, deluxe, lavish and
brimming with sensual danger. On the up side, it has STAR TREK:
NEMESIS' Dina Meyer as Batgirl-cum-Oracle. On the down side, she's
playing a cripple (excuse me, walking challenged) so the likelihood of any
Schumachereque butt shots seems rather slim.
On the other (or do I mean another) hand, UPN wheels out its own version
of the living infirmed with the latest version of The Twilight Zone, due to
lose ENT's lead-in every Wednesday night as viewers switch en masse to NBC's
The West Wing. ABC queues up the series version of Dinotopia on Thursday
nights, for those who were actually left wanting more after Jurrasic Park
III. Twin Peaks meets The X-Files meets Survivor in the Ben Affleck
co-created Push, Nevada on Tuesday nights (or, at least, for the first two
weeks). And then there is the wild card in all of this fluidity: FOX's Friday
night lineup featuring the intriguing concept show John Doe and the eagerly
anticipated science fiction opera by Buffy the Vampire Slayer's creator, Joss
Whedon, called Firefly. Of course, FOX is not doing either show any favors by
slotting them into the night which discernibly stung Dark Angel's ratings
last spring. Five shows are gone; seven new ones follow on their heels. If
any series not named Birds of Prey (nicely placed to breast feed on
Smallville's audience) survives, it will be a miracle. On the plus side, that
day is not so far off when Lester Moonves finally throws in the towel and we
see C.S.I. Miami repeat performances on UPN every week. I mean, CBS has got
to give UPN something more than Wolf Lake. Right?
So within this turbulent landscape, the ratings challenge for the second
season of Star Trek's latest series, what TV Guide calls “neither the best
nor the worst of Star Trek”, can be defined by a single watchword: stability.
Brannon Braga can talk all he wants about reinvigorating the
franchise and gaining a new audience for Star Trek but success for a show
which lost nearly 60% of its premiere audience in one season (more than
any show still airing on network television) can only be objectively
determined by one criteria: halting the ratings slide and stabilizing the
viewer numbers. Rick Berman can quote all the mumbo-jumbo demographic
statistics he wants about hitting a target audience but demographics say a
lot more about how a show is perceived to be performing inside the
industry rather than what the reality is every Wednesday night at the 8
o'clock hour outside of Los Angeles, CA. Demographics are a weak sister
defense of a show's performance. When the owner of a automobile dealership
confronts one of his salesman with the fact that "your sales are 60% below
their level just 9 months ago", the defense "yeah, but every SUV I sold was
to a married couple with children" is just not going to cut it... or save his
job.
Given the fact that this new season represents a huge turnover in the
science fiction/fantasy genre for network television, and the path appears to
have been cleared for ENT by the departure of The X-Files and Dark Angel, one
might reasonably conclude that securing the #2 slot behind Alias, and perhaps
even challenging for that # 1 slot itself, is a realistic ambition for the
2nd season of ENT. However, for a show whose ratings has to date been
predominantly characterized by slippage (not to mention the creative
weaknessess discussed by O. Deus in his first season re-cap), looking to the shows behind it will be more paramount (no pun
intended) for ENT than eying the big dog ahead of the pack. For all intents and
purposes, ENT begins the second season in the #2 slot of the starting blocks
behind Alias. But that position will be immediately challenged by The WB’s
Smallville and, most likely, its companion series Birds of Prey. In fact, if
it hadn’t for ENT’s top-heavy start the first month of last season,
Smallville would have finished the season with higher viewer numbers than
ENT. It is unlikely that ENT will get that kind of head start in season 2.
Also, if Joss Whedon’s Firefly is able to pull in the Buffy the Vampire
Slayer/Angel audience on a regular basis, no one should be surprised if
Firefly also surpasses ENT’s viewer numbers. Dark Angel’s viewer numbers
last season certainly took a hit on Friday night but it was by no means
lethal. Ironically, what was lethal to Dark Angel was Whedon’s Firefly,
giving it the curious distinction of having already killed off one of its
competitors without ever showing a single episode.
Making matters worse for ENTERPRISE, UPN has been downgraded nationally. According to Reuters, in 25 markets the network has moved to weaker UHF outlets and lost three medium-range affiliates over the summer. Spokane, WA, Honolulu, HI and Madison, WI all changed to the WB for the new fall season.
However, as strange as it may seem at first glance, the real model ENT
needs to look to in its ratings challenge can be found anchoring The WB’s new
Sunday night lineup; the Buffy spin-off Angel. Angel has never regularly
pulled in the viewer numbers that the most-watched ENT episodes did in its
first season but it possesses something which ENT lacks; a reliable
week-to-week audience. In TrekWeb’s Season Rating
Wrap-up of the first season, it was demonstrated why Angel forces The WB to keep it around despite less than overwhelming
ratings. When we compared the percentage differences between the most and
least watched episodes of the season and then indexed this to average
audience numbers throughout the season, it was clear that Angel along with
Alias and Smallville (of the returning shows) was in the upper echelon of
genre shows in terms of endurance. In the case of Angel, this translated into
solid viewer numbers which The WB can rely upon week-in and week-out with
very little fluncuation in viewer numbers. In short, Angel’s audience is
loyal. Of course, that Angel supplanted Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a
critical darling last season only helped The WB’s decision-making process.
This is why The WB has placed a load of responsibility on the shoulders of
Angel and Charmed (which also possesses a very loyal and reliable yet still
smaller audience) to anchor their troublesome Sunday night line-up. Only time
will tell if the The WB’s Sunday night move was pure genius or habitual
suicide. In fact, this is one of the more interesting questions to be answered this fall: can Charmed and, especially, Angel’s small but loyal audience
solidify The WB’s Sunday night line-up?
More importantly, the example of Angel brings into focus the challenge ENT
faces in its 2nd season. Before it can “bring a new audience to Star Trek”
and before it can challenge Alias for top dog, it has to do something which,
given the history of Gene Roddenberry’s franchise, is a remarkable indictment
of Bermanesque Star Trek. ENT has to instill loyalty in the remaining viewers
it has before it can even dream of challenging for a new audience. ENT has to
make the people who haven’t already given up on it want and
have to watch the show every Wednesday night at 8 o’clock before it can
dream of bringing back those viewers lost in the 1st season. Last season proved that “getting new viewers” is easy. Holding onto viewers is hard.
Given a Star Trek fan base which numbers tens of millions - most of whom have
an unheralded reputation for loyalty -the task at hand for a fifth Star Trek
series, which last season seemed incapable of instilling loyalty in that fan
base, could not be more daunting.
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