On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television PLAYING THE SWEEPS BY REUVEN FRANK November 12,1992, the back page of the first section of the New York Times was filled by an advertisement asking, in screaming type: "IF A...
...But," he would explain, "it's the only wheel in town...
...Soon the sweeps ratings themselves were reported by network, each adding up the ratings of its affiliates hoping to claim victory from the results...
...Why, then, the expensive ad on a premium page of the Times...
...This November we had Betty Broderick, The Last Chapter, which continued the story for two more hours...
...Advertisers are, of course, conscious of this...
...As in February and May (and in a lesser way July), ratings are taken in November not only nationally—that is, from a single sample reflecting the population of the entire country—but from separate samples in each "market...
...No, insisted the expert...
...Shows of this kind are especially appealing to females from 18 to 49...
...Mostly they saw jerky pictures from concealed cameras being sneaked past security guards into operating rooms and other medical venues where a felon with thievery in his heart would probably find very slim pickings...
...Makers of made-fors, as they are referred to, like stories out of the headlines...
...Broderick (now in a California women's facility) to denounce the first program, and TV Guide to devote five pages to her denunciation...
...Now it is used in the trade as the neutral descriptive for what is standard...
...in the aggregate they are a national sample...
...The movies with the biggest names were saved for the sweeps...
...Although there have always been films on television, at the outset Hollywood saw television as its nemesis, its death sentence, and refused access to any good or recent releases...
...And neither one proved anything about the other...
...So four times a year the ratings companies send diaries to participants in 213 individual local samples to record their viewing hours...
...It did...
...The executive did not understand...
...Initially, the networks resisted...
...Four lines of smaller type identified the question as a "Special Investigation" by Channel 2 News, and suggested that the answer would be aired at 11 p.m...
...The ratings they used and stood by for half the country showed a lead of 60-40...
...Programming to boost ratings for sweeps months was called "stunting," spoken as a pejorative...
...the ratings they used and stood by for the whole country showed barely more than 50-50...
...There seems no need for separate efforts in those areas...
...Measuring audiences is an expensive business...
...Nevertheless, they are like the uncontrollable gambler in the very old joke who every payday lost everything on a roulette wheel that he and everyone else knew was fixed...
...of a woman—do you notice a certain sameness?—abused by her husband when no one believes her account that he murdered their neighbor...
...The very thought that election night coverage might help the prime time ratings during a sweeps month was revolutionary...
...then each had two...
...One has nothing to do with the other...
...Ratings, as we are all aware, determine income...
...Theoretically, networks are not involved in sweeps...
...and the mysterious death of a Hollywood executive long dead...
...All these were presented as reports on news programs over the past month...
...Prurience and medicine are the major subjects of sweeps-time investigation...
...Any 12-year-old could tell you: November is a "sweeps" month...
...Indeed, they go all out to hype, pad and otherwise fatten their audiences...
...For a bit of extra mileage, stations carrying their networks' made-for-TV movies seek out local examples of the disability or social pathology they describe...
...What broke precedent was the headline in the trade paper Electronic Media: "BIG 3 LOOK TO ELECTIONS AS SWEEPS DRAW...
...Similarly, producers were ready to move if William Kennedy Smith had been found guilty of rape in Palm Beach...
...Those were two separate samples giving two separate ratings...
...There are other old reliables, like prostitutes setting up in respectable neighborhoods and creating a public nuisance...
...These are featured prominently on the 11 o'clock newsprograms?0p.m.Central time—that typically follow the movies...
...networks squeezed advertisers for bigger fees...
...The networks disdained what was available, pretending all movies were beneath them...
...A few years back, child pornography was of great concern to local news editors in November, but not in October or December...
...Since the findings during sweeps months directly affect the stations' economic health, they early on abandoned all pretense of not trying to manipulate them...
...The latest offshoots have included sex shops that sell to juveniles, preventing miscarriage, toxic shock syndrome, fertility pills, and couples who no longer find each other sexually attractive...
...They fictionalize nonfiction to regale an audience they seem to hold in low regard...
...The networks' biggest contribution to sweeps month stunting is in that special category known as made-for-TV movies...
...when I got those just out of Monday, I stopped...
...the private life of exotic dancers...
...From the time they started, though, affiliate stations wanted help in getting their ratings up...
...On Television PLAYING THE SWEEPS BY REUVEN FRANK November 12,1992, the back page of the first section of the New York Times was filled by an advertisement asking, in screaming type: "IF A DOCTOR CAN BE RAPED AND MURDERED IN A HOSPITAL, HOW SAFE ARE YOU...
...Stations cannot afford to pay for that every week, as networks used to, or every day, as they do now...
...As affiliates became more important, especially to the networks not in first place, they were catered to in this as in everything else...
...Obviously, the management of WCBSTV, Channel 2, New York assumes that raped and murdered doctors attract young viewers...
...One day's listings in November offered the woman "whose abusive husband put out a contract on her life...
...Oh, no, he was told...
...schedules were amended and bent to keep the locals happy...
...As usual with television, advancing technology has complicated the system without improving the product...
...special entertainment forms were developed...
...The syndicated tabloid programs and talk shows have gone further...
...and of a woman who at 17 gave her baby for adoption, later learned the child had died, and pursued the adoptive mother until she was charged with murder...
...CBS and NBC had news magazine programs feature reports about that old standby, pornography...
...An ABC executive told me how exhilarated everyone at the network was when the metered sample, representing slightly more than half the country, came in showing their Election Night coverage had beaten CBS' 14.9 to 10, almost 3 to 2. A few days later, he went on, the national ratings arrived showing ABC had beaten CBS by no more than 0.4 of a percent...
...In the 27 largest markets, instantaneous and constant ratings actually have been taken for several years by metering devices attached to television sets...
...The sweeps just ended had a five-hour biography of Frank Sinatra and another of the Jackson Five—especially its most famous 20 per cent, Michael...
...I do not know if this is true, nor do I care to find out...
...setting a private eye on a spouse suspected of infidelity...
...Or both...
...having a baby to save its sibling's life...
...A shortage of movies developed while the profits were zooming...
...He observed to the ABC ratings expert that they must have done very poorly in rural areas for the national ratings to have fallen so far below that for the 27 largest markets...
...Thus was born the made-for-television movie...
...They had been produced to enable movie theaters to entice Depression-era audiences with "double features," two films for the price of one...
...The networks said to themselves, "We can do that," imagining the money to be made if they did...
...The boy who wanted to "divorce" his parents was deluged with offers for the rights to his story—up to $400,000, by one account...
...The ratings system has other strange aspects to it...
...Such movies may sometimes have sequels...
...And yet, this did not prove that they had done poorly in the other half of the country, the half not included in the metered rating...
...they are perfect for stunting during sweeps...
...Anyone who took the bait and tuned in that night heard merely a glancing reference to the young doctor who was raped and murdered three years ago in New York's Bellevue Hospital...
...In honor of November, too, Phil Donahue appeared on NBC in prime time with clips from a quarter-century of his programs, and a live audience of celebrities in tuxedos...
...Those are two separate samples...
...CBS did very well last spring with the story of Betty Broderick, a middleaged San Diego housewife rejected by her husband, whom she killed, along with his new bride...
...Also in prime time, Oprah Winfrey interviewed her very best names for ABC...
...There even are consultants who specialize in training newsroom staffs in the art of exploiting the networks' madefor-TV movies by finding the local angle to enhance the late news...
...Studios took to charging more and more for them...
...I had intended combing a week's listings for this selection...
...This has nothing to do with the original purpose of sweeps, but almost no one remembers what that purpose was...
...I do know that the penchant of local news programs for lurid subjects during sweeps periods has been a national joke for at least three decades, yet that has not diminished it...
...of another woman who, 20 years after the event, went public with the sudden memory of her father murdering her girlhood friend...
...In November, we had the story of a Texas woman so eager to have her daughter make the high school cheerleader squad that she hired a murderer to kill the mother of the teenager who might stand in the daughter's way...
...Only "B" movies that were bad enough and old enough were offered up...
...Geraldo Rivera once interviewed lesbian nuns, which connoisseurs still recall as a landmark of the genre...
...For about a year, you could watch a movie on one of the networks every night of the week...
...National ratings determine network income, local ratings the income of stations...
...Before long each network had a movie night...
...As for the advertisers, they like the controversy...
...In a notable coup, CBS, as part of the publicity for the sequel, got Mrs...
...There was too much money to be made —on both sides—for that situation to last...
...Therefore diaries go forth in those 27 places as well, and the hype goes on there, too, not so much to increase audience size as to attract those younger people Madison Avenue cherishes...
...They come to meetings waving newspaper clippings...
...You might still conclude that one of the ratings was wrong...
...Double features being moribund by the time television arrived, plenty of "B" movies in the can at Republic, Universal and even the major studios could be secured by the local stations for The Late Show, The Late, Late Show, MillionDollar Movie, and the rest...
...Meters, however, apparently do not adequately record local demographic characteristics...
Vol. 75 • November 1992 • No. 15
