Posted on: Friday, March 21, 2003

TV viewers are deserting Saturday nights

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post

Reality programming offers a possible hope for Saturdays: It's inexpensive to produce and usually attracts the younger audience advertisers demand.

Fox has shown the way for years. "Cops," which averaged about 9.4 million viewers last month, is in its 14th season, and "America's Most Wanted" is in its 13th, although advertisers are wary of both shows, given that they tend to attract a less-affluent demographic.

"Repurposing" — essentially rerunning a series just days after its original airing — has been tried on Saturdays, too, but with a mixed reception from both viewers and advertisers.

"You have to find something completely different and noisy," says Lloyd Braun, chairman of the ABC Entertainment Group. "NBC was right about the XFL, at least on paper. I desperately want to go after ... (Saturday nights), but you have to be smart about it."

ABC recently ran its "Survivor"-like reality show "I'm a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here" on Saturdays. The ratings were among the lowest of the week for any ABC show.

If Saturday's pulse is all but gone, the next crisis for the networks may be Friday night. Nielsen reports that Friday night viewing this season is only slightly above Saturday's totals — by about 1.6 percent — which suggests that Friday is on the verge of becoming the new Saturday.

It also suggests something that has been otherwise unthinkable for decades: that someday, maybe soon, one or several of the major networks will stop programming Saturday nights altogether. "I know the other networks have talked about that," says CBS' Leslie Moonves, quickly adding, "but it's not anything we would consider."

Says ABC's Braun, "To not program seven nights a week is a complete and total cop-out. It means we're not doing our job."