Television: When Things Are Rotten

"It is either a viewers' revolt or Nielsen has screwed up his figures," says one network executive. "I've been in this business since 1948," adds a New York rep for a number of major-market stations, "and I can't remember a crummier season than this one."

These are not aesthetic judgments. What is bugging the broadcasters is a drop of 4%—perhaps more—in the number of sets in use. Just as alarming is a fall-off in network ratings among viewers who are still bothering to tune in something or other. To date, helped by its nighttime World Series coverage, NBC has the best prime-time rating. But it is only a 19.3, which just a year ago would have been second in the standings. Indeed, NBC is winning while losing, with its rating down 5% compared with the same period last year. CBS, for 20 years the ratings leader, is in even worse shape, suffering a 12% loss (and the ignominy of twice running behind the usually lowly competitor ABC).

Thin and Thin. Where have all the people gone? Can it be that for once they believed the critics, who, upon previewing the new season, unanimously declared it unfit for human consumption? Is there a silent protest? Possibly. But there is not and never has been any such thing as a really good television season, and though this may be the absolute worst, that has to be a distinction so fine as to require deliberation by a board of moral philosophers. No one has yet determined how many bad ideas can dance on the pinhead of a network programming executive; the outside limit may not have been reached.

Besides, some experts suspect the defections from network programming are confined to a not much coveted demographic group—viewers 50 and older.

Some insiders insist that the 39-49 crowd —still demon consumers—have joined the Geritol set. And that they are all responding to a decline in quality. According to this argument, the networks have tied themselves too tightly to a small group of producers who have provided hits in the past but whose shows inevitably have a certain sameness about them. Universal is responsible for 8% prime-time hours (out of 22) on NBC alone this year. Some of the good independents like Norman Lear and Mary Tyler Moore are also overextended —and overimitated. This gives viewers a narrow range of choices: cop and doc shows, ethnic sitcoms, nice-girl sitcoms. It has become harder to tell good from bad in this small spectrum. Still, the suspicion lingers that TV's real—if possibly temporary—trouble springs from precisely the opposite condition.