How the Networks (Barely) Survived the Fall TV Season
Because of the long lead times involved in the production of made-for-streaming shows, this year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes didn’t have a huge impact on the fall programming of most major streamers. But broadcasters weren’t so lucky: Their tentpole scripted hits were almost entirely absent when the 2023–24 season kicked off in late September, forcing schedulers to improvise as best they could. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, overall viewership of the major networks has taken a big hit — down about 15 percent versus year-ago averages, per Nielsen. The Big Four (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) are now collectively averaging just over 18 million viewers every week, marking the first time the broadcast average has ever dipped below the 20 million mark at this point in a season.
And yet, while the big-picture numbers clearly aren’t great, broadcasters at least managed to avoid suffering the sort of complete collapse some industry insiders had feared might be possible with a fourth quarter that didn’t include new episodes of any major scripted hit. That’s in part due to the fact that the networks are more reliant than ever on programming that wasn’t impacted by the work stoppage: sports and reality shows. There was a lot more of both on schedules this fall, helping cushion the blow from the absence of hits such as Chicago Fire, Abbott Elementary, and Ghosts. Plus, some desperation moves by networks — like CBS’s decision to put years-old episodes of Yellowstone or ABC simulcasting ESPN’s Monday Night Football — paid off. “The networks all did what they needed to crawl through the tunnel of crap at the end of The Shawshank Redemption,” one industry vet says. “They needed to keep the machine going, and they did.”
We’re not going to know how bad things are until next year.
This is not to say that there still won’t be a price to pay for the strike delays. While it’s common for cable and streaming shows to take 18 months or even longer off between seasons, network shows typically rest for no more than four to five months. With most series starting back in mid-February, the hiatus this time will be closer to nine months. “We’re not going to know how bad things are until next year,” the industry insider says. The overall averages for the first two months of the season don’t look too bad right now because they’ve been inflated by higher football ratings, but there’s a real fear in the industry that a decent chunk of the viewers who were still in the broadcast ecosystem last spring, and still in the habit of watching episodes weekly and in prime time, may simply not come back. We saw that happen after COVID delays played havoc with production schedules and viewing habits: The Big Four went from averaging roughly 28 million viewers during the last full pre-COVID season (2018-19) to barely 21 million a mere two years later.
But it’s also possible the worriers are, once again, underestimating the reliance of broadcast TV. While there’s no doubt the networks are a shadow of their former selves, even at their worst — i.e., the past few months — they’re still able to get millions of people to watch something on the same night. Amazon might be doing well with Thursday Night Football, but the biggest games are still on broadcast. Reality shows are rarely considered prestige TV, but nearly a quarter of a century later, a network series like Survivor remains a part of the cultural conversation in a way that 90 percent of critically loved streaming shows aren’t. The fact that networks have been able to muddle through with so little scripted this fall probably means we are going to see even fewer scripted originals on broadcast in the next few years. On the other hand, the networks might also emerge from this dark period having picked up some new tricks to help them reach their most important goal: to survive.
The Official Buffering Strike–Season Report Cards
As noted, we won’t get a truly accurate read on how this Fall Without Hits impacted broadcast’s overall trajectory until well into 2024. But nine weeks after the start of Nielsen’s official season, we do have a sense of how each of the Big Four weathered the strike storm, and what their performances might portend for the future.
ABC
The Disney-owned network raised eyebrows when, just a few days after the WGA strike began last May, it announced a fall schedule with exactly zero first-run scripted-series programming. Beyond being a sign ABC was banking on a prolonged work stoppage, it felt like the network was minimizing the importance of sitcoms and dramas — or just exhibiting extreme hubris — by not trying to find some sort of scripted substitute for hits like Grey’s Anatomy. But as it turned out, ABC’s strategy turned out to be a smart one: Instead of tanking, the Alphabet network’s average audience this season (4.6 million viewers through Sunday) is currently up 12 percent versus the same time in 2022— the only network with positive momentum in that metric.
ABC delivered one of the season’s few breakout hits: The Golden Bachelor.
It’s no mystery how ABC avoided bleeding viewers: In September, Disney CEO Bob Iger signed off on a plan to simulcast the entirety of ESPN’s Monday Night Football season on the network. That meant ten additional weeks of ABC notching an average of 11 million-plus viewers in prime time, more than doubling what the network could have expected in those three hours every week. It was more than enough to make up for the loss of not having new scripted series.
But ABC’s unscripted division was also a key player in keeping the network’s audience engine humming this fall. Top Iger lieutenant Dana Walden, co-chair of Disney Entertainment, made the smart call to return Dancing With the Stars to network TV (while also keeping a simulcast on Disney+), a move that allowed the network to effectively counter NBC’s hit The Voice on Tuesday nights. Meanwhile, the Alphabet’s unscripted team delivered one of the season’s few breakout hits with The Golden Bachelor. Both rank among the fall’s top most-watched entertainment shows and are also doing well with younger adults under 50, drawing the same demo ratings as NBC’s The Voice and Fox’s The Masked Singer.
Football and DWTS won’t be around come January, so it’s unlikely ABC will hold on to this lead for the full season. I only mention the network’s current standing because more than any sort of quarterly “victory,” the relative success of ABC’s strike lineup has made it clear that the network can do reasonably well even without expensive scripted shows, at least for a few months. As Disney execs continue to weigh their commitment to linear TV, this fall’s results probably point to a future where ABC survives with even fewer comedies and dramas, as well as programming it shares with other Disney platforms. Indeed, less than two hours before this newsletter was sent out, ABC announced that season one of Hulu hit Only Murders in the Building is getting a four-week run on the network in January.
CBS
The Eye network typically has more scripted successes than any other network (as measured in overall audience), so it’s no shock that it saw the biggest ratings decline this fall: CBS lost a full one-third of its overall audience versus this time in 2022, the steepest decline of any broadcaster. But that’s mostly just a sign that the network is more dependent on scripted in the fourth quarter than its rivals and that it has more broadly popular hits. It also didn’t have football in prime time to prop it up the way ABC and NBC did, save for some spillover on Sunday nights. None of this is to suggest CBS hasn’t felt real pain this quarter, but said hardship was fully expected.
The lesson all of the Big Four should be learning from this season is, you’re not simply a monolithic broadcast network anymore.
What’s more telling is the individual successes CBS has had plugging the holes in its lineup left by the absence of its biggest audience magnets. The one that’s made the most headlines is the scheduling of early seasons of Yellowstone on Sunday nights, giving the Eye a top-20 hit with five-year-old cable reruns. (You can bet its success is one reason why Only Murders is headed to ABC.) But CBS has also done well with NCIS: Sydney, a series developed for the company’s sister network in Australia (and Paramount+); episodes of the original BBC version of Ghosts that had already streamed for years on Max; and supersize 90-minute editions of Survivor and The Amazing Race. While they weren’t enough to make up for the lack of fresh episodes of tentpole shows such as The Equalizer and NCIS, the Eye’s fall roster still kept the network reasonably competitive on most nights.
CBS’s strike season also offered network execs some valuable insights for how to manage ever-shrinking content budgets. Expanding Survivor and Amazing Race to 90 minutes let CBS fill three hours of prime time while essentially only paying for two. (There are some minor costs associated with supersizing reality shows, but nothing close to what an hour of a separate show would cost.) And as with the ABC/Disney+ DWTS simulcast, successfully importing Yellowstone and NCIS: Sydney from other parts of the Paramount Global empire served as a proof of concept for the notion that a network like CBS doesn’t always need to grow its hits in-house. Much the way basic cable thrived on network reruns 20 years ago, there’s no reason big streaming successes shouldn’t sometimes get a broadcast window at some point in their life cycle. Most won’t work as well as Yellowstone — a cable smash that happens to be linear TV’s biggest scripted hit — but many will be able to find a solid audience via linear runs. “The lesson all of the Big Four should be learning from this season is, you’re not simply a monolithic broadcast network anymore. You’re a multi-pronged exhibitor of programming,” the network veteran says. “If a company wants to maximize its investment in content, you’re almost required to do multi-platform now.”
Fox
Like CBS, Fox has seen its overall average audience take a big hit this fall: The network is currently averaging just 3.4 million viewers per week, down about 25 percent from the 4.7 million it was attracting a year ago and fourth among the major networks. But Fox has never really played the total viewer game, historically focusing instead on reaching younger viewers —and on that front, its fourth-quarter report card looks a lot better. Per Nielsen, its entertainment programming is in a virtual four-way tie with ABC, CBS, and NBC among adults under 50, while also overperforming among Zoomers and younger millennial adults under 35. These standings admittedly don’t mean all that much this early in this season— and especially this season— but they do indicate Fox has done a decent job staying competitive.
It helps that Fox has a strong demo performer with WWE Smackdown on Fridays plus college football on Saturday and several weeks of NFL doubleheaders bleeding into prime time on Sundays, giving it three straight nights of strong ratings. What’s more, its Sunday-night animation lineup was unaffected by the WGA and SAG strikes: The long lead times in animation meant new episodes were already in the can for the fall. Fox took advantage of this— and the halo effect of those Sunday football games — to successfully add Dan Harmon’s new toon, Krapopolis, into its toon mix. While no overnight smash, the show seems to be fitting in nicely between The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers, though it almost doesn’t matter if it wasn’t since Fox renewed it for a third season even before the first episode aired. Throw in the loyal audiences for The Masked Singer and whatever dish Gordon Ramsay is serving up, and Fox can make a decent argument that it survived the strike season relatively unscathed.
NBC
As we wrote in September, NBC was the network most ready for a strike: It pushed up production of some projects and held back broadcast of others, and as a result, it was able to launch a fall schedule with no fewer than five original dramatic hours, including two new shows — Found and The Irrational — that have both been renewed for second seasons. Combine the scripted strength with a strong Sunday Night Football season, and NBC currently ranks as the No. 1 network overall in both total viewers and adults under 50, with ratings essentially flat versus a year ago. And even when sports programming is excluded, the Peacock network remains on top in viewers and is just a smidge behind ABC in the demo. It did all this with virtually no stunting and despite having no new episodes of its six super-successful Dick Wolf dramas from the Law & Order and Chicago franchises. The only real lesson from NBC’s strike season? It pays to be prepared.
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