Article about BB Finale/Ratings
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Article about BB Finale/Ratings
Mckryan | Monday, October 02, 2000 - 07:19 am  RATINGS REPORT: Final Big Brother Outruns A Stumbling Olympics By Tom Bierbaum Monday , October 02 09:55 a.m. Big Brother ended its undistinguished run on Friday with typically forgettable Nielsen results -- forgettable except that they were good enough to beat NBC's Olympics head-to-head in most key demographics. Unfortunately for Brother, that had more to do with a stunning Friday collapse by the Olympics than any real surge for CBS's reality series. According to preliminary ''fast affiliate'' ratings for Sept. 29, the Big Brother finale averaged a 4.7 rating, 17 share in adults 18-49 and a 7.2/13 in homes, good enough to beat the Olympics that hour in adults 18-49 (4.7/17 vs. 4.3/15). Brother's margins were overwhelming in some other key demographics, such as adults 18-34 (with a 4.9 rating vs. a 3.1) and women 18-34 (5.8 vs. 2.8). It wasn't as if Brother was beating the Olympics at their best, though. NBC's Friday and Saturday preliminary 8-11 p.m. household averages (10.6/20 and an 11.6/21 respectively) are the two worst 8-11 p.m. figures for any night of Olympics coverage since the opening Saturday of the 1988 Winter games from Calgary. Counting only summer games, these are the two lowest-rated nights since at least 1976. That's dragged the Sydney households average all the way down to a 14.0/25, far short of the 16.1 rating guaranteed to some advertisers and the 17.5 NBC set as a goal for these games. Sydney will finish as the lowest-rated Olympics since Mexico City in 1968. Big Brother managed a decent little Nielsen flourish at its conclusion -- its best non-Wednesday numbers to date in most demographic categories, with a 32 percent jump over the show's overall average in adults 18-34. Brother still made no meaningful advance over its previous best Friday numbers (4.6/16 in 18-49, 7.9/15 in homes July 20) and came nowhere near the worst it ever did in a time slot following Survivor (7.7/21 in 18-49, 10.8/18 in homes Aug. 16). The final verdict on Big Brother has to be a fairly positive one, though: the producers gave viewers a terrible show and still generated healthy demographic gains everywhere they tried it. If they can fix what went wrong with Big Brother 1 and hook up the new-and-improved version with Survivor this winter, the competition could still be in for a lot of trouble. CBS hasn't made an official commitment for another round of Big Brother yet, but development is under way. As long as the show's Dutch production entity, Endemol, agrees to address the perceived problems with round one, it's going to be hard for CBS to turn its back on this property. Entering Friday's finale, Brother had sparked increases compared with results in the same time slots one year earlier of 65 percent among adults 18-49 and 118 percent among adults 18-34. One can only imagine what CBS might have done this summer with even a modicum of genuine action or romantic tension on the show. Big Brother has also helped keep the median age of CBS's audience below 50 for every week since the Survivor finale. Last season, CBS's regular schedule averaged a median age of 53. As for the dive the Olympics took Friday and Saturday, part of the problem was something NBC had no control over -- the failure of Marion Jones to keep alive her drive for five gold medals into the weekend. That historic quest ended many hours before the Friday night telecast, when Jones settled for a bronze in the long jump. (Jones still made women's track history with five medals -- three gold and two bronze -- in a single Olympics.) The biggest Friday-Saturday problem, though, appeared to be a lack of viewer interest in extended coverage of the U.S. men's basketball team and its final two games. Even with Saturday's gold-medal game representing the one and only live telecast during the entire games, viewers fled. The contest started at 10:15 p.m. Saturday, and by the 10:30-11 p.m. half hour, NBC's households rating tumbled by 25 percent compared with the 10-10:30 half hour (9.4/17 vs. 12.5/22). Granted, expecting viewers to stick with a two-hour event that starts at 10:15 p.m. is asking a lot, but if 10:15 p.m. isn't a good time for a live event, what about the 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. live telecast so many of NBC's critics were clamoring for? Through Saturday, an estimated 182 million viewers had watched at least some of the Sydney coverage on NBC, CNBCand MSNBC. The cable ratings highlight of recent days came with Wednesday's MSNBC 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. coverage, featuring the women's soccer final (won by Norway over the U.S.). That segment averaged a 0.9 households rating in the MSNBC universe, more than quadrupling the service's third-quarter average for the time period of a 0.2. With one night left to count, NBC's prime-time 14.0/25 average is running 21 percent below the 17.7/32 of the Seoul games in 1988, down 19 percent from the 17.3/33 of Barcelona in 1992 and down 35 percent from the 21.6/41 of Atlanta in 1996. |
Mckryan | Monday, October 02, 2000 - 07:20 am  Forgot to mention...this came from Inside.com. |
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