Rebecca Crockett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.
Ratings.
It’s what television networks live and die by. If your shows aren’t getting good ratings, then something must be wrong. Either it’s the shows themselves or those that chose to air them. Even with the licensing system in the UK meaning that the BBC doesn’t have to air adverts, the ratings any given show makes will be a factor in the decision to continue their productions for another series. If a program doesn’t get the best ratings, it will eventually become too costly to continue.
When it comes to shows that have a history, those that have been on the air for many years or have a franchise (like Law & Order or CSI) can sometimes have leeway when they don’t necessarily perform the way the network executives think they should. Doctor Who is no exception to this, especially given it’s 50 year plus history.
But unlike other shows, Doctor Who is a big profit winner for the BBC. It’s arguably the show the brings in the most money, with all of the licensing contracts they have not only to air the show across the world but for all of the merchandise that has ever been produced baring the image of the TARDIS or the logo or anything else related to the show.
So does Doctor Who‘s ratings really matter? Even more, are the overnight ratings, those that measure how many people watched any given episode the night it aired, all that important any more?
You Cant Wear A Bow-tie Anymore Without Someone Thinking It’s Cool
The show is not what it once was – a quirky little uniquely British “children’s show” that was generally a national hit in the UK but only had a cult following in the rest of the world. The little sci-fi show that everyone had heard of but not many people had seen.
Capaldi’s first three episodes have gained more than 2M viewers in the ratings points once the overall score is complied.
Now that same show is a worldwide phenomenon, most recently proved by the world tour that Coleman, Capaldi, and Moffat went on to promote the new series. Thousands of people gathered at every stop to see the starts and the executive producer (who at this point is almost a star of the show given how much he influences all parts of the production) and more than half of those people showed their love and devotion by dressing up as characters!
What other show in the history of television production across the globe can claim any of this? Not even Star Trek, which will see it’s own 50th anniversary in two years’ time. (And I say that as a life-long Trekkie who eagerly anticipates whatever anniversary celebrations Paramount has planned. I have a feeling they won’t be half as big as what Doctor Who accomplished…)
Sometimes Time Zones Suck
There is usually a time, generally in the early evening on Saturdays, when I curse the fact that I live in the US. That time is always between when the latest episode has aired in the UK and when BBC America airs it for the first time on the US East Coast. Now, I’m luckier than some because that means my air time is the first for America, but even then it’s a long four hours to wait. (And thanks BBCA for pushing it back and hour – we used to only have to wait 3 hours!) And then there are all the other countries that air Doctor Who, some of which are not hours but weeks behind the original UK air date.
If I could gather every Who fan across the world into one place at the same time, I’d love to do a show of hands to get a count of who watches the latest episode when, and how.
Raise your hand if you watch the show as it airs on BBC One? And now those of you that DVR the episode in the UK?
Okay, now how many of you watch it the first time it airs on BBC America? And those of you that DVR it in the US?
There alone are just four different viewing times for the same episode. So if you only factor in the first-run viewings of the program in the UK alone, look at all those eyeballs you’d not count at all!
Now, who watched the episode via the BBC iPlayer? Or iTunes? Or Amazon? And now, be honest, who here finds some version of a live stream as the episode airs in the UK or finds a bootleg copy of it somewhere on the internet, usually even before it airs in the US? And who simply waited for it to be released on Netflix or DVD?
To get a true ratings score, you’d have to factor in the episode’s original transmissions, every time it was listed in someone’s DVR, every new click to start the episode on the iPlayer, every download and purchase of it from iTunes, Amazon, Goolge Play, etc., and then every time it’s started on Netflix and every dvd sold with the episode on it…and that’s just all the legal viewings!
Hiding Behind The Sofa
Not everyone loves a good scare. If you only saw the previews for the most recent episode, Listen, you’d have thought the episode was going to be one of those scary ones that Doctor Who is known for, one that might have the adults behind that sofa, not just the kids. And in the end, it was pretty creepy.
Would it shock you to know that some of the scariest episodes the rebooted show has seen – Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit and Blink – have some of the lowest overall combined Doctor Who ratings for their respective series? Yet they are some of the best episodes the rebooted show has ever done. So a worry that the show was doomed after the first scary episode of Peter Capaldi’s run is a bit dramatic!
It’s A Brave New World
We’ve just started what has to be the toughest part of any series of Doctor Who, stretching all the way back to the classic era – we’ve had a regeneration.
Why such doom-and-gloom, the-sky-is-falling, the-world-is-ending negativity after just four episodes?!
A new man in the TARDIS always brings a great reception, mainly because people want to see what the new guy is all about. But then the next episode will always have fewer initial viewers, those being people who regularly watch the show versus those just tuning in for the spectacle. When the overall ratings for Capaldi’s first two episodes were released, they showed just a 1.88 million drop in viewers, far less than the almost 3 million difference between those that watched Rose, the pilot episode of the rebooted series, and those that watched the second episode, End Of The World!
So far, Capaldi’s first three episodes have gained more than 2M viewers in the ratings points once the overall score is complied. And yet, even with a lower overnight rating for Listen, past history tells us that jump will surely happen again.
Then why such doom-and-gloom, the-sky-is-falling, the-world-is-ending negativity? After just four episodes?! Let’s let Mr. Capaldi stretch his legs in the role a bit before we start predicting the end of the world, shall we? Besides, we need to worry about more important things, like was Clara really talking to the child we all think she was talking to at the end of Listen? And who exactly is this Missy person?
The post Forget Doctor Who Ratings: Why Overnights Don’t Matter In 2014 appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.