Anderson Cooper’s new talk show, “Anderson,” is averaging a 1.4 household rating and 1.8 million viewers for the first three weeks of this season.
Ten years ago, those numbers would have triggered panic and flop sweat among the show’s producers and the stations airing “Anderson” (Ch. 11 here) — yet it’s the season’s top-rated new syndicated talk show.
And it’s considered a successful launch.
Welcome to the new world of daytime TV, where the viewership bar has been substantially lowered — and the heyday of “Oprah” and her 10 million talk-show viewers is a distant memory of a time likely never to be seen again.
“I remember when we launched a [USA Today] talk show in the late ’80s and it debuted to a 5.8 rating — and that was considered bad,” says Marc Berman, editor of TV Media Insights. “Now, if you add up all the new syndicated shows, you’re lucky to even get a 5.0.
“The audience is so segmented that it’s not like it was 10 years ago, when people would watch TV in the daytime” he says. “And, as the years progressed, nothing seems as original anymore.
“How many talk shows can you have?”
The days of the “big” daytime launch haven’t been around for a while now, especially in the talk show genre.
When “Dr. Oz” launched in 2009, with Oprah Winfrey protégé Dr. Mehmet Oz, the show averaged 3.2 million viewers in its first three weeks.
That was buzzworthy at the time, since it was the biggest talk-show launch since 2006, when “Rachael Ray” debuted to 2.8 million viewers in its first three weeks.
The top rookie talk show last season? That would be “Nate Berkus,” which averaged a 1.0 rating and only 1.2 million viewers.
(“Dr. Phil” by comparison, averaged 5.3 million viewers in its first three weeks when it premiered in 2002 — and ended up finishing the season with nearly 6 million viewers, on average.)
“There’s just a lot of competition, and it’s a lot harder now to break through the clutter,” says industry analyst Brad Adgate of Horizon Media.
“The bar’s been lowered for what’s a hit,” he says. “Shows that would have been canceled 10 years ago are being renewed.”
Which begs the question: why continue to churn out talk shows (and court shows) when viewership has become so fragmented?
“If you find an audience and click, distributors can make a fortune — these shows are not expensive, and, cost-wise, they make a lot of sense,” says Berman.
“It’s not like a [successful] network show, which will have a shelf life of six or seven years,” he says.
“If you find an audience and manage to succeed, you can last for decades — though it’s a totally uphill battle.”