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‘G.M.A.’ Beats ‘Today’ Over a Full Season

As he pushed “Good Morning America” through a heated ratings competition with NBC’s “Today” show, Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, had three goals: first, to win just one week; second, to win one of the television industry’s so-called sweeps months; and third, to win for a full television season. He called it “the trifecta” in conversations with colleagues.

And on Friday, ABC achieved it: a full-season win for “G.M.A.” for the first time since the early 1990s.

G.M.A.’s lead over “Today” has been acknowledged several times already, both by the network and by viewers. Still, the full-season triumph is something that ABC chose to trumpet on Friday as the network news division positioned itself as one that is growing, or at least holding steady, at a time of fracturing television audiences.

The 2012-13 television season, as measured by Nielsen, started in mid-September 2012 and ended earlier this month. The final seasonal viewership figures for the morning shows were released on Friday. They reflected a once-in-a-generation change: “G.M.A.,” which had lost to “Today” for 852 straight weeks before notching a one-week win in April 2012, has taken a decisive lead among total viewers, with an average of 5.3 million viewers on a typical weekday. That is nearly 700,000 more than the “Today” show, which had an average of 4.6 million.

One season earlier, “Today” had 5.1 million viewers and “G.M.A.” had a little under 4.9 million.

“CBS This Morning,” which was rebooted in early 2012 and is now hosted by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell, had an average viewership of 2.77 million. For CBS, that is a big improvement: one season earlier, the network had 2.44 million viewers in the mornings.

Among 25- to 54-year-olds, the demographic that really determines success or failure for morning shows, the ratings race remains tight. “G.M.A.” had almost two million viewers, about 85,000 more than “Today.”

According to ABC, “G.M.A.” has not led “Today” for a full season since the 1993-94 season.

Some, though not all, of “G.M.A.’s” gains can be attributed to missteps by the “Today” show, including the dismissal last year of Ann Curry, a longtime member of that show’s cast. “Today” is now trying to lure former viewers back; it has resisted the temptation to dismiss any other cast members, and has instead added two, Willie Geist and Carson Daly. This month it introduced a remodeled studio and a new graphics package.

Some of “G.M.A.’s” gains can also be attributed to content choices. The show has become more entertaining in the last few years, sometimes eschewing serious news for stories about sensational court cases, celebrities and trends, especially after 7:15 a.m. While its rivals dismiss the show as too tabloid-oriented, ABC defends its coverage as a reflection of what viewers want to see when they wake up.

“G.M.A.” has tried not to get too comfortable in first place. Through a spokesman on Friday, Mr. Sherwood said, “Our immediate goals are to keep building on our strengths, to stay hungry and humble, and to keep our eyes on the prize.”

When the 2012-13 season was starting, the “G.M.A.” co-host Robin Roberts was in the hospital, undergoing a grueling bone marrow transplant. In February, she returned to the show on a part-time basis, but it was not until this month that she resumed hosting full time.

While the mornings are the most lucrative part of the day for the network news divisions, the evenings remain essential as well, and there NBC ended the season ahead, as it has for 17 years. “NBC Nightly News” had more than 8.3 million viewers on an average night, 700,000 more than ABC’s “World News.” ABC has crept quite close in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic, however, and in July actually beat the NBC newscast for one week. NBC has avoided a repeat loss since then.

TV Talk: The Fall Season

September 27, 2013By Christopher Cascarano

New York Times reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter assess the latest offerings by television networks to score primetime hits in the fall season.

Another Promising Night for Fox and Its Early Start to TV Season

On its second night of jump-starting the new television season a week before its network competition, the Fox network again got some positive results.

A new comedy, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” got some promising ratings; another, “Dads,” fared well enough to hold out some hope, and one returned comedy, “New Girl,” showed some renewed strength.

Only one comedy, “The Mindy Project,” generated disappointing numbers, probably disappointing as much to critics as to Fox executives because “Mindy” had been widely extolled before its second-season premiere. The premiere also featured a guest appearance by James Franco.

Even so, Fox will probably take the overall performance on a Tuesday night, where it struggled badly last season. Probably the best news was the strong showing for “Brooklyn,” another favorite of critics, which drew six million viewers and a solid 2.5 rating among the group Fox sells to advertisers, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49.

The other new series, “Dads,” which had been excoriated by critics for what they charged was racially insensitive humor, managed a 2.1 in that 18-49 group and 5.6 million viewers, both respectable numbers for a newcomer. “New Girl” returned with 5.6 million viewers and the best 18-49 rating of the night, a 2.9. Both numbers were up slightly from the show’s premiere episode a year ago.

“The Mindy Project” however, showed what may be a worrisome falloff from “New Girl,” dropping to just under four million viewers and a 1.9 rating in the 18-49 group. Fox, which is also offering projections of how its shows will fare when delayed viewing is counted, offered some hope for “Mindy,” suggesting it could eventually reach more than six million viewers and climb to a 2.7 rating among those younger adult viewers.

That would still be a sizable falloff from “New Girl,” which Fox thinks could get as high as more than 10.5 million viewers and perhaps a 4.7 rating in the 18-49 category.

Advertising: Advance Ad Sales for New TV Season Called Lukewarm

After months of buildup and weeks of negotiations, the five English-language broadcasters finished their sales last week in what is known as the upfront market, so named because it takes place before each season begins. The results were not as bad as some had expected, but not as robust as others had hoped.

That reflects how trends in television advertising have been, for a while now, “O.K. but not great,” Doug Creutz, a media analyst for Cowen & Company, said in a report late last month.

Pricing in the upfront market, he added, “was generally in line with expectations — perhaps just a touch light,” with increases in a closely watched metric known as cpm, for the cost to reach each 1,000 viewers, in the mid to high-mid single-digit range.

“A touch light” is not a phrase normally associated with upfront seasons, but the broadcasters “suffered their worst annual decline in viewership” during the 2012-13 season since the 2007-8 season, which was affected by the writers’ strike, Mr. Creutz said. There was no true breakout hit among new series, along with a worrisome slump in ratings for the sophomore seasons of popular new shows from the 2011-12 season.

Although it is notoriously difficult to come up with exact figures for the results of each upfront market, estimates are that the five broadcast networks received commitments from marketers to buy about $9 billion worth of commercial time during the 2013-14 season, which begins next month and continues through May. That is roughly on par with or a shade lower than what they took in last summer, in the 2012-13 upfront market. The results are not that bad considering the outcome of the 2012-13 season or the myriad problems of legacy media, as shown by the sales, in rapid succession, of Newsweek, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

Television “is not going away for now,” Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at the Pivotal Research Group, said in a phone interview, because it is “still the least bad way to get your reach and frequency,” referring to two important goals of marketers when communicating with consumers.

As valuable as digital media may be, “you can’t do without” television “if you’re a large brand,” he added, because “you can’t accomplish your media goals” without it.

There was a major difference between this year’s upfront negotiations and last year’s: the dickering ended about six weeks later this time around, primarily because of delays in marketers coming to terms with two of the five networks, ABC and NBC. Those talks concluded last week, whereas CBS and CW wrapped up in early June and Fox Broadcasting the previous week.

The later conclusion of the 2013-14 upfront market might have benefited the broadcasters, Mr. Wieser said, because some marketers may have decided to “bring forward” money they planned to spend during the season in what is called the scatter market. With the start of the season now only a month away, he noted, the line between the upfront and scatter markets could have blurred. (Making commitments during an upfront market is a bet that prices will be higher during the season; deciding to hold back money for the scatter market is a bet that prices will be lower during the season.)

CBS, the biggest broadcast network, led in the total dollar amount of commitments, at $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion; by some estimates, CBS’s take may have been as much as $2.75 billion. The cpm rates that CBS is charging advertisers for the 2013-14 season are estimated to be increasing by an average of 7.5 percent.

According to Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, CBS fared the best in the upfront marketplace.

“Once again, we took share from our competitors and we were the leader in both volume and pricing,” he told analysts last week.

In something of a backhanded compliment, Mr. Moonves said of the other broadcasters, “I even noticed our competitors got substantial price increases as well, which actually surprised me, how well they did.”

The rest of the estimates for dollar volume are: ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, $2.1 billion to $2.2 billion; NBC, part of the NBCUniversal division of Comcast, $1.9 billion to $2 billion; Fox Broadcasting, part of 21st Century Fox, around $1.8 billion; and CW, a joint venture of the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, $400 million to $420 million.

For the second consecutive year, cable channels have fared or are faring better in the upfront market than their broadcast competitors. Estimates are that the combined take for the scores of cable channels that sell commercial time will total as much as $9.8 billion. Many channels are enjoying more robust demand than the broadcasters; for instance, AMC, part of AMC Networks, has said its ad sales are nearly 20 percent higher than in the upfront market last year.

ABC Introduces 12 New Series for Next Season

The network, which saw its prime-time fortunes flag this season with no real new hits, announced that it will present at least 12 new series next season: five comedies and seven dramas. As has been ABC’s penchant in recent years, the shows tend to appeal to women, which is consistent with the network’s current roster, with holdover hits like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal.”

ABC also showed affection for projects that have some connection to its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, with two new dramas.

One is “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,” which beyond being a test of keyboard dexterity makes a show out of a Disney property from Marvel comics that involves daring special law-enforcement agents. The big name associated with the show is the creator, Joss Whedon (“Buffy The Vampire Slayer”).

ABC will try a spinoff of “Once Upon a Time” with “Once Upon a Time in Wonderland,” showing a lack of concern about a drop in ratings for the original. The new show takes Alice, the White Rabbit and others down the rabbit hole for new adventures. John Lithgow is the White Rabbit.

In “Resurrection,” ABC will go for a little scare with a show about an 8-year-old boy who apparently comes back from the dead.

The network will try a cop show with a woman in the leading role in “Killer Women,” about a tough young female Texas Ranger.

And it will go with a psychological crime drama in “Mind Games,” about two brothers who head a firm that uses psychological manipulation to solve problems. Christian Slater will here try again to find a hit TV series.

Soapy mystery has worked well for ABC in the past two seasons, so it will go back to the well with “Betrayal,” about a young woman, married to a prosecutor, who begins an affair with a defense attorney — and guess who wind up opposing each other in a murder trial?

“Lucky 7” is a comedy-drama about what happens to a crew of co-workers at a gas station when they win a lottery prize.

The hot comic Rebel Wilson appears in “Super Fun Night,” about a young woman on the rise in her career and romantic life who still tries to share Friday nights with her girlfriends. It is produced by Conan O’Brien’s company.

James Caan is in “Back in the Game,” playing an ex-ballplayer who gets roped into coaching the Little League team of his grandson and friends, all of whom stink at baseball.

“Trophy Wife” stars Bradley Whitford (“The West Wing”), who is on his third wife but harassed by the previous two.

In “The Goldbergs,” created by Adam Goldberg, a child named Adam spends his ’80s childhood driving his family crazy by videotaping everything in their lives. Jeff Garlin (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) plays the father.

“Mixology” takes place supposedly all in one night in a single bar in Manhattan with a group of young people pairing up.

Some threatened shows survived on ABC, including “Nashville,” but some did not, including “Body of Proof” and “Happy Endings,” which may find a happy landing on the USA Network. Still up in the air: the fate of the comedy “The Neighbors.”

Media Decoder: Anderson Cooper Talk Show Won't Return for a Third Season

Ali Goldstein/Warner Brothers Anderson Cooper during a taping of his show “Anderson.”

The syndication arm of the Warner Brothers studio has decided that there will not be a third season of “Anderson,” the daily talk show hosted by Anderson Cooper.

Citing disappointing ratings, a studio executive, who insisted on not being identified because the studio had planned no official release on the decision, said on Monday that the entire talk television market has been struggling to build audiences. Mr. Cooper’s show, which is produced by Telepictures, will end after the summer of 2013.

The executive spoke because some of the stations that have been carrying Mr. Cooper’s show have begun making feelers about replacement shows, and the news was certain to leak out through one of them, the executive said.

The Warner Brothers syndication unit issued a statement on Monday:

“We are extremely proud of Anderson and the show that he and the entire production team have produced. While we made significant changes to the format, set and produced it live in its second season, the series will not be coming back for a third season in a marketplace that has become increasingly difficult to break through. We will continue to deliver top-quality shows throughout next summer.”

Mr. Cooper released his own statement:

“I am very proud of the work that our terrific staff has put into launching and sustaining our show for two seasons. I am also grateful to Telepictures for giving me the opportunity, and indebted to viewers, who have responded so positively. I look forward to doing more great shows this season, and though I’m sorry we won’t be continuing, I have truly enjoyed it.”

The decision was not a reflection of any lack of faith in Mr. Cooper, the executive said, but an acknowledgement of the business realities in daytime talk television.

The studio “could have renewed the show but could not create a viable economic business model to move forward,” the executive said.

Even Katie Couric’s much anticipated new talk show has not yet emerged as a bona fide hit, the executive said. And new shows with other hosts, including Jeff Probst and Ricki Lake, have fared poorly.

But Mr. Cooper, who is also a mainstay in prime time on CNN, had been expected to be a star in daytime talk when his show started last fall. After one year with sub-par ratings, the studio and Mr. Cooper instituted a series of changes including stressing same-day tapings as often as possible to deal with breaking subjects, and a new location for the studio.

Mr Cooper was on assignment for CNN in New Jersey Monday, covering Hurricane Sandy.

Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.