America’s latest free-to-air TV hit

In the months of March and April 2020, there was a breath of hope on traditional television in the United States: the audiences of the free channels increased during the confinement. It gave the impression that the population was rediscovering the value of the grill and of traditional television with series such as Grey’s Anatomy O Chicago fire obtaining the best figures in a long time. It was a mirage.

After those two months of unexpected television bonanza in a pandemic context, the audiences entered the usual decline of the last five years. The ABC, FOX, NBC and CBS channels lost 10% of the audience compared to the previous year and up to 12% of the audience that advertisers seek (the 18 to 49 year old audience). In the case of The CW, which has a more youthful profile, this decline was 25% in viewers and 40% in the key target. Some not encouraging data.

Decline

In the United States, the audiences of the main channels have dropped by 10% and, in the case of The CW, which seeks young audiences, by up to 25%

This is why television portals are very obsessed with a specific series: Big Sky, which will land in Spain on February 23 through the imminent Disney + adult tab called Star. It is a thriller where David E. Kelley is carried away by his talent when it comes to writing lifelong fiction (he is the author of classics like Ally McBeal, The Lawyer and Picket Fences) and less because of the recent fashion of signing adult series and with pedigree of cable channel or content platform (he has also written The undoing and Big little lies).

4.15 million viewers were pending in November the pilot episode in the first show of the ABC channel (owned by Disney) and they were captivated by the story it proposed. There were kidnapped girls, gun detectives taken and faced by the same man, villains were presented to frame and everything was reminiscent of the usual fiction with touches from Twin Peaks until Desperate women.

The 4.15 million may not be a staggering number, but viewers were added on a delayed basis until last week it was discovered that 14.7 million viewers had seen Big Sky within 35 days of issuance. Not only is it being the success of the season, but ABC has not had a success of these characteristics since it premiered The good doctor in fall 2017.

With these data and the inability of conventional television to lead fiction, Big Sky it could become the latest big hit from a trendsetting TV model now in unstoppable decline. You just have to look at the other proposals that the Big Four have offered: they neither capture the interest of critics, nor do they capture the interest of the public, nor do they create social conversation.

Great data

‘Big Sky’ had an initial audience of 4.15 million but that rises to 14.7 after adding the audience that has seen it delayed

In the same situation are the cable channels in the United States, which were the first responsible for eating part of the cake to the free channels: they have problems to maintain the audience for their content, especially their fiction, and this makes it difficult to be profitable produce.

The case of Pop TV is a clear example: it was able to see a considerable increase in its audience in 2020 due to the broadcast of the final season of Schitt’s Creek, which also took all the Emmy awards there and to be, but the directors decided to abandon the original production due to the impossibility of making it profitable.

And, in fact, the most symptomatic was the success of Schitt’s Creek: Maybe Pop TV was a co-producer of the fiction together with the Canadian channel CBC but the series became popular when Netflix included the platforms in its US catalog. This allowed word of mouth to begin and the final season to be a success on linear television.

This path was not even unusual. When Breaking bad was fired in 2013, the fantastic audiences for the final episodes were attributed to the addition of the title on Netflix. The public had discovered the seasons on the platform and had caught up to see the outcome live via the AMC channel, which was responsible for Walter White’s existence.

The sector

Cable also suffers from the power of the platforms: Pop TV had the final season of ‘Schitt’s Creek’ but has decided to stop producing fiction

The free channels of the United States, owned by large studios, are already taking action in this new panorama. Aware that they no longer cut the cod in fiction with their open bets, that making them profitable with advertising is already an impossible task and that they could not always assign the rights to Netflix so that the platform would profit and be even more essential, all of them streaming platforms have launched.

ABC and FOX, which are owned by Disney, have Disney + and Hulu; the NBC channel of NBCUniversal has its Peacock platform; from CBS they have started the Paramount + project after having had CBS All-Access for a while; And, as The CW is owned by CBS and Warner Bros, their projects can be said to be out on Paramount + and HBO Max.

The audiences of this last channel are so tiny that there are journalists who already even contemplate The CW as a showcase for fictions that later end up on payment platforms. This creates doubts. For example, it will be necessary to see if the rest of the channels embrace the window dressing nature for fiction or if they will choose to produce more entertainment programs (with cheaper potential), live shows and news. After all, the news channels are the only ones keeping fit in a bleak television landscape.

It is also interesting to think that the irrelevance of live television can also eliminate a fictional model: the one that has the episodes structured around ad breaks with infallible rhythms, the one that limits the duration of the episodes (and thus often takes the best of the scriptwriters), the one who is not afraid to be openly and for all audiences (and not just a specific niche), the one who does not try to be controversial. And it is that the public can adore The good doctor, NCIS O The big bang theory but the platforms do not seem interested in producing similar content.

Another model

The platforms do not seem interested in producing series in the style of ‘NCIS’, ‘The good doctor’ or even ‘The big bang theory’

And for this the success of Big Sky it seems to arouse so much admiration on the part of American journalists: for the implicit nostalgia of its essence, as if it were the last survivor of an extinct civilization.

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