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TMCNet: The Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm column: Jonathan Storm: 'True Blood,' nearly as red-hot as a winter show

[August 24, 2010]

The Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm column: Jonathan Storm: 'True Blood,' nearly as red-hot as a winter show

Aug 24, 2010 (The Philadelphia Inquirer - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Look what happened while you weren't watching TV this summer: hits you may have never heard of (Rizzoli & Isles?), cable's surpassing the big networks' numbers, and yet, even in our high-tech society, old-fashioned reruns carrying the day.


Networks are raking in cash from nitwit, yet sometimes entertaining, reality shows. Cable channels are feathering their nests with undistinguished, yet ratings-reliable, scripted shows. Just a few years ago, it was the other way around.

And the outfit that televises the summer's biggest hit doesn't take in a nickel of on-air advertising. By one measure, HBO's True Blood ranks in the top 20 shows of the entire 2009-10 TV season, right up there with 60 Minutes and The Bachelor.

Summertime, like every season these days, is still the time for talent shows, but it's also decidedly the off-season in television. According to Nielsen Co. measurements, NBC's America's Got Talent was TV's most-viewed show for the week ended Aug. 15, the latest full week for which ratings are available. It averaged 10.5 million viewers. In January, the heart of the traditional eight-month TV season, American Idol was attracting nearly 2 1/2 times as many viewers per episode. The No. 14 show one week in January, ABC's Castle, got about the same numbers as summertime's top-rated Talent.

Other competition reality shows have found more than a foothold this summer. ABC's Wipeout, which began life in obscurity two years ago with its Big Red Balls and people-bashing obstacle courses, has been pretty much a Top 10 show all summer. It was renewed for a fourth season last week. NBC has spread its new Minute to Win It to two nights a week and has ordered more episodes of the show, in which contestants must quickly perform nerve-racking tasks.

If you're saying, "Wait, that sounds like Beat the Clock," a CBS game show from the '50s, you're probably still watching CBS this summer. There are trends among the trends in summer cable and broadcast TV, but week in and week out, reruns of NCIS, Two and a Half Men, 60 Minutes, The Big Bang Theory, NCIS: Los Angeles, and The Mentalist have finished in the Top 10 among shows and made The Eye the top spot for TV viewing. Its voyeuristic Big Brother, once the king of summer success, finishes behind those repeats, but is still a force, solidly in the middle of the top 20 broadcast shows, averaging more than 7 million viewers.

Some summer cable series are also living in that neighborhood. It was big news a few years ago when cable surpassed the combined power of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Now the choices have burgeoned, and in the week ending Aug. 15, the so-called Big Four accounted for an anemic 23 percent "share," which means more than three-quarters of the people using a TV set in prime time weren't watching them.

All sorts of cable reality shows are siphoning the viewers. On Sunday, for some reason, the season premiere of Keeping Up With the Kardashians attracted 4.7 million viewers and became E!'s second highest-rated episode ever. MTV's Jersey Shore usually does about 10 percent better than that -- it's the most successful cable reality show this summer, followed by History Channel's American Pickers (carefree guys scour the countryside for antiques) and Pawn Stars, which has made celebrities out of a good-natured Las Vegas family of moneylenders.

In the summer on cable, however, drama, most of it easygoing, frequently with a touch of humor, shines.

The top packages are on TNT and USA, where Royal Pains (tales of a concierge doctor in the Hamptons) and two spy shows, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs, regularly snag more than 5 million viewers an episode.

TNT's female-friendly Monday-night combo of The Closer, with Kyra Sedgwick, and the brand-new Rizzoli & Isles, about a rough-and-ready cop and her more refined medical-examiner pal, has been ruling the summer roost on cable, with each regularly attracting more than 7 million viewers. Those numbers could sneak them into the Top 10 among all TV shows on many weeks in summer.

Seven million viewers doesn't crack the top 60 overall when regular winter shows are included in the list, but it's still no mean feat. ABC's Extreme Makover: Home Edition, NBC's 30 Rock, and Fox's The Simpsons have comparable audiences.

But the summer's biggest TV success story is also its scariest and sexiest. Fewer than a third of America's 100 million-plus TV households get HBO, yet the pay-cabler's True Blood, riding the youth culture's vampire wave, has regularly finished in the top 20 shows in the standard Nielsen measurement on all of television this summer, occasionally cracking the Top 10.

That Nielsen measurement is called "live, plus same-day," which means any playback of a premiere-night episode before 3 a.m. gets counted. In the week ended Aug. 15, that number for True Blood was 5 million viewers.

But, as HBO copresident Richard Plepler reminded TV critics at their annual summer meeting this month in Los Angeles, the premium network gets more than twice as many viewers for True Blood as the week progresses than it does on premiere night, with on-demand, postponed DVR watching, and all the reruns, not only on HBO but also on such offshoots as HBO2 and HBO HD. Making money through subscriptions and not advertising, HBO doesn't care when people watch.

"True Blood cumes up to over 13, probably 13.2" million viewers, Plepler said. In HBO's small world, those are Super Bowl numbers. It's difficult to make precise comparisons, but, basically, roughly the same number of people watch Sookie Stackhouse and her supernatural friends each week as watch not only The Bachelor and 60 Minutes but also such other wintertime network hits as Lost and House.

True Blood wraps for summer on Sept. 12, and the fall season for all the networks begins one week later. Among all the new shows, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, premiering Sept. 19, is No. 1 on most critics' lists, and they will be watching carefully to see if HBO can continue its extraordinary success when the broadcast networks put their varsity teams on the field.

Contact television critic Jonathan Storm at 215-854-5618 or jstorm@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "Eye of the Storm," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/storm.

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