Today in Tedium: I have this memory of the one period in my life where I wasn’t sure if I could make it on my own. It occurred in the winter of 2006, when I had just departed from a bad roommate situation and was waiting for a good one to open up. The result meant that I spent like a month in an extended stay hotel. (I don’t recommend it, but it got me by.) I had a decent job, but it was far from anyone I really knew. Plus, my laptop had just died. I was not thriving. But I had one thing going for me back then: A moment I consider My Olympics. It was February 10, 2006, the greatest single night in television comedy history. That was when not one, but four episodes of Arrested Development aired back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a moment of binging that would predict the show’s future as a streaming favorite. My favorite television show of all time ended its run against the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and I honestly could not have cared less. In a way, Arrested Development had been dumped into the Friday night death slot, murdered by a network that did not understand it. Today’s Tedium considers why broadcasters dump shows on Friday nights. — Ernie @ Tedium
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“I know that ratings are as popular with some television viewers as ants at a picnic. If I need to be reminded, I only have to read my mail.”
— Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., the president of the ratings firm A.C. Nielsen, in a guest essay for the Associated Press, published in July 1964. The essay notes that even at this juncture, the system had gained a reputation as a show-killer.
Star Trek, one of the first notable recipients of a Friday night death slot, in an issue of TV Guide.
What about Fridays makes it such a good dumping ground?
In a lot of ways, it’s important to consider motivations with television programming. Creatives have the motivation to produce the best, most creatively fulfilling works they can. Meanwhile, television executives have to maximize their investments, knowing that they want to create the most attractive circumstances for advertisers, which will be more likely to spend more on advertising against a hit rather than a flop.
Demographic considerations could shift this factor somewhat—a show with a small but desirable audience might be worth more than one with a large but less-valuable one. It can help—but it may not be enough. For example, let’s say you have a show that has a passionate audience, but just isn’t pulling in the numbers to make it a worthy option for keeping on the air.
When you have a series that you consider a problem child, a great way to get rid of it is to isolate it from the rest of your lineup, where few people will be likely to see it.
Judy Lynn Benjamin, the editor of Galaxy magazine, a science-fiction title, was one of the first to make this association between Friday evenings and low ratings among the public on January 28, 1968, in an interview with The Kansas City Star. The subject? Star Trek, the most infamous example of a television show treated poorly by its network. She suggested that the reason the show was performing poorly was because it aired on Friday evenings in its second season. She described the reason for this as such:
Friday night is a bad night and the time period is a very bad hour. Most of the audience is made up of teenagers and young adults and when do they go out? Friday night!
Hard to argue with that. But it didn’t help that, in its third season, the network pushed the show to the 10 p.m. Friday hour, an hour that ensured that the kids that generally watched the show were probably already in bed.
The thing is though, the “death slot” hasn’t always been the domain of Fridays. For years, it was widely believed that Sunday evenings were one of the worst spots to be on television. In 1966, Andy Williams lamented his show being moved to the 10 p.m. Sunday slot by stating, “The thing that convinced me that moving my show to 10 p.m. Sunday is a good move is that they said do it or you don’t go on.”
Williams ultimately stayed on the air for a few years longer, cutting his appearances at one point, but the time slot did not prove the death knell that he initially believed. (Perhaps this is because Sunday now has the reputation of being the best day to watch TV in prime time, at least in the U.S.)
The first mention of a death slot I can find at all came in 1962, in a UPI obit for legendary television comedian Ernie Kovacs, which states it like this:
Among the many shows he had and left was the “death slot” opposite Milton Berle, then king of TV, and whose party he attended minutes before he was killed.
But getting back to Fridays, what about them earned them this reputation above any other day of the week? You might be interested to learn that people actually watch more television on weekends than weekdays. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people watch an average of 3 hours 19 minutes per day on average on weekends, versus 2 hours 32 minutes on weekdays.
Nonetheless, since at least the middle of the 2000s, most networks (CBS excluded) have embraced the idea that it just ain’t worth scheduling any fresh scripted content during the period anymore. Perhaps the network that best exemplifies this lesson is Fox. The network famously only airs two hours of prime-time programming most nights, rather than the more common three. The result is that shows that might have made sense for the 10 p.m. hour end up having to compete for space earlier in the evening.
Or they might get pushed to Fridays, which is what frequently happened to shows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Were you a fan of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. in 1993? Hope you had a VCR+ or the ability to clear your schedule!
The greatest example of this was Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which premiered during the time period and suffered greatly at the hands of network meddling, with its original pilot airing months after the show had already premiered. This show, more than any other, reinforced the idea that Friday nights schedules did irreparable damage to good content. It took a while for the network to figure it out, but Fox eventually realized that maybe they should just air sports or wrestling on Fridays instead, which is what they do now.
Still though, there’s no reason that Fridays need to be seen as a dead zone, a way to repeatedly destroy the goodwill of science fiction fans in a matter of months. And one show in particular shows what happens when networks bother to try on Friday nights.
“If you want a show to reach an 18- to 34-year-old audience, you should not put it on Friday. It makes no economic sense.”
— David F. Poltrack, CBS’ head of research, talking to The New York Times in 2011 about the challenges that networks have in scheduling Friday nights. (Noting my NYT linking policy.) CBS has had more luck than most other networks programming on Fridays because their shows are generally aimed specifically at older audiences. Case-in-point: The police procedural Blue Bloods, a show led by 79-year-old Tom Selleck that has been a mainstay of Friday nights since its premiere way back in 2010.
The Strokes’ “Juicebox,” which featured David Cross in the video. Cross was a star on “Arrested Development,” a recipient of the Friday night death slot in February 2006—though The Strokes kind of did the music version of that a couple months prior.
Five other examples of content getting buried with odd timing or in odd places
- The post-Christmas album cycle. In 2005, The Strokes decided to release the band’s third album, First Impressions of Earth, on the second-to-last day of the year, robbing the record of a chance to appear on year-end lists. The timing seemingly suggested to both fans and critics that it might not be as good as the first two records. Many reviewers noticed.
- Dump months. This refers to the film industry, which has historically put films that it felt could not be successful into theaters in months when people don’t tend to visit theaters as much. Think the waning summer months of August and September, or the winter months of January and February. A lot of cult classics get thrown into the mix during this time frame—and sometimes, they become big hits anyway, benefiting from a lack of competition. In fact, recent hits like Deadpool and Black Panther have started to undermine traditional thinking.
- Ultra-competitive time periods. In 1972, CBS had a problem: It had replaced all its rural-themed shows with urban ones, in a situation called the Rural Purge, and the attention that this move got created significant political pressure to release a fresh rural-themed show. It did so, putting it against two then-megahits, in an attempt to bury it, only to find the show would gradually outdo the competition. The result was that The Waltons put The Flip Wilson Show on its back within just a couple of seasons, ensuring cancellation of the latter. It was an example of an attempt at burying that didn’t work.
- In a time period that’s likely to suffer from football overspill. If you’re a fan of King of the Hill, you know this one all too well. While NFL games have tended to be over by the time The Simpsons aired, things often weren’t over by the 7 p.m. ET hour, ensuring that anything that aired before that point was at risk of getting pushed off. By the way, the reason the football game always wins? Because the one time a football game was cut off by a broadcast of something entertainment related, a famous come-from-behind victory was missed, an infamous situation called “The Heidi Game.”
- Required FCC content at odd hours. Local TV networks are required to air content like children’s programming or public affairs programming each week. But local TV networks naturally treat this requirement like something they don’t want to do, dumping this programming in the middle of the night, or on the weekends to minimize its impact to the networks. If you’ve ever wondered why some odd public affairs program is on at 3 a.m., this is why.
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The answer to the question, “Is Friday a ratings black hole in every country?” As the long-running international television trade magazine VideoAge reports in a survey it conducted in 2017, many countries have different low-rated days. While English-speaking countries like the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. tend to have schedules that peak on Sundays and bottom out on Fridays, countries like Greece and Italy actually see their ratings numbers bottom out during the week. Notably, China reportedly has its highest ratings on weekend days, with TV less popular during the week—one of the only countries that lists Friday as a most-watched day.
Red Foxx and Demond Wilson in Sanford and Son, perhaps the most popular Friday program in television history. (Columbia/via IMDb)
The show that proved that Friday nights didn’t have to be ratings wastelands
Norman Lear was a television legend, but he was also a wizard, making ratings hits in places others wouldn’t dare. All in the Family, during the bulk of its run (and the entire period during which it was the top-rated show on television), aired on Saturday nights on CBS. The show only moved from that prime spot because of the controversial Family Viewing Hour, never recovering its dominant ratings perch, though the series and a direct successor remained on the air for nearly a decade afterward.
(When was the last time you remember watching a memorable program on a Saturday that wasn’t cheap reality or newsmagazine fare? The answer to that question: The Golden Girls.)
And likewise, Norman Lear also had a direct hand in another megahit of the period, Sanford and Son, which he helped adapt from the British show Steptoe and Son. (All in the Family? Also a British comedy adaptation.) It’s not often that British resets actually work out well in the U.S. market (The Office aside), but Lear seemed to have a gift for it. In Sanford’s case, the reason it worked was in large part because of Redd Foxx, who was basically impossible not to watch in that show.
Some highlights from Sanford and Son, in case it’s been a few decades since you’ve seen it.
At the time, Fridays were broadly used for comedies on the lineup of the three major networks, but Foxx had a reputation as a very raunchy comedian, which made Sanford stand out. While most of the “blue” stuff was kept out of the show, it retained enough of Foxx’s vibes that he became one of the biggest sitcom stars of his era.
(Also helping: It was a show with a primarily Black cast at a time such a thing was uncommon on television.)
And the show turned out to be a mega-hit. Even though the show didn’t even premiere in every single market operated by NBC, it was good enough to be one of the biggest hits of the entire week upon its premiere. And it kept up that success: At the height of its run, it was second only to All in the Family.
Yes, we once lived in a world where the two most popular shows on American television aired on Saturday and Friday, respectively. Its success at 8 p.m. on Fridays undermined many of the criticisms lobbed at the Friday time slots just a few years earlier, when Star Trek couldn’t make it work at either 8:30 p.m. or 10 p.m. All those people supposedly partying or at the movie theater made Sanford and Son appointment viewing in a way Star Trek never was.
In fact, Sanford was such a good lead-in that by the mid-1970s, every single show on NBC’s Friday lineup was a top-15 hit. That’s right. In 1974, NBC’s Must-See TV day was Friday.
In some ways, it comes down to context and product. Fridays were good for broad comedies and dramas—but not necessarily for philosophical science fiction. I think NBC really harmed Star Trek by failing to understand who the show would appeal to, and the result was a show where ratings and audience never properly connected during its initial run.
There have been later eras of Friday success, of course. Starting in the late 1980s, ABC found a way to make it work by putting two hours of family comedies (including, notably, the introduction of Steve Urkel) in the 8 p.m. hour, then the newsmagazine 20/20, a lineup the network branded as TGIF.
But if it makes the executives of that era feel any better, all the other executives of every other era have mistakes just as bad on their permanent record.
In the modern day, dead zones on the ratings schedule are still a thing, but also less of an issue. The reason? Streaming has made them less prominent. Broadcast television has declined so deeply in ratings that it might as well be seen as a nonentity at this point.
But I think that as long as there are programmers with financial interests in minimizing costs, there will always be a way to harm programming with cult followings. The most notable example of this in the streaming era involves the decision to remove shows from services to cut down ongoing costs, or even shelving them entirely. It is essentially another color of what networks were doing when they were dumping shows on the weekends.
On the other hand, there are lots of other ways to damage the placement of shows you don’t think deserve a shot. Among them: Failing to surface them on the front page of a home screen, not working on their search metadata to make interesting shows easy to find, or failing to do any promotion.
Going back to the network television picture and how it often fails to properly use its Friday or Saturday night schedules, one has to wonder: If these networks aren’t really doing anything useful with these spaces, why not give them back to the community? After all, these are public airwaves and rerunning a repeat of a show that could be streamed elsewhere feels like a bad way to invest in those airwaves.
ABC, CBS, and NBC have programming on Fridays, largely of the newsmagazine variety, even if Fox doesn’t, but it does seem like they each seem to struggle to fill the Saturday schedules with anything beyond sports, which doesn’t run 52 weeks per year.
Let me offer a good example of what a good investment in these time periods might look like: Since 1990, the Children’s Television Act has required terrestrial broadcasters to air as much as 156 hours per year of educational programs. But the rules have long been controversial and followed by the letter of the law, rather than the spirit. As Deadline reported in 2016, many of these shows have evolved into glorified product placement for various brands, with the content developed to only hit a small portion of the audience for children, ages 13 to 16. It’s cheap content created with the idea of sponsorship rather than something that actually fulfills the goals of the audience.
Also, at the same time, the Federal Communications Commission regulations require networks to air content in the public interest. It is hard to see how rebroadcasting old content on weekends, as networks often do, is in the public interest. It might be better to do one or two things.
- Give inefficient programming blocks back to the stations or the community to air locally produced content, covering the FCC requirements to produce content in the public interest.
- Put educational or informative content targeted at kids in prime time dead zones, rather than burying it between infomercials, as many local stations tend to do. It will force networks to produce it at high quality levels actually in the spirit of FCC regulations.
If broadcasters are baking dumping grounds into their schedules, it’s worth at least discussing alternatives that benefit the public good—and pressuring networks and local stations alike to do better.
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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! I sent this on a Sunday to avoid a Friday night death slot of my own. See ya in a couple of days.
