A Brits Guide To US TV-Page 3
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
SWEEPS
If you’re already confused by this labyrinth, prepare for one of the things that makes US TV particularly peculiar to UK eyes. Advertising rates for US networks aren’t decided based on the number of viewers for particular shows over the entire year. Instead there are three so-called sweeps months, in November, February and May (technically there’s another in July, but as networks generally don’t air their biggest shows over the summer, this one is normally ignored). It is from these four week periods that the advertising rates over the coming months are decided, and so the higher your viewership during these key periods (and more importantly, the number of viewers in particular demographics), the more you can charge for adverts.
The result of this is that when we watch American TV, we don’t do it in the same way as Americans do. The first and biggest difference is that when a season of a US show starts on UK TV, we get a new episode every week until that season is over, which is normally 22-24 weeks later. Most of the time, American viewers can’t do that, as the networks want new episodes in all three sweeps months, but don’t care as much at other times. The result is that you might get six new episodes in October and November, then a gap where there’ll only be reruns, then a few more new episodes around the February sweeps, before it stops again, ready for a final blast of new episodes in May. The result for people trying to keep track of densely plotted shows is that they’ll often have to try and remember all the key points of an episode for more than a month, before they get to see what happens next.
Things are changing however. Rather than sporadically getting new episodes, several US shows are now experimenting with showing the entire season in one or two blocks, with a new episode each week. ‘Lost’ is one of these, as is ‘24’. However most seasons of a show are shown in bits and pieces over nine months, which is one of the main reason why seasons that start in early autumn in the States, won’t be seen on UK screens until January at the earliest, as otherwise we’d run out of episodes and have to wait for the US to catch up.
You may have also noticed when watching US TV that there seem to be blocks of episodes that are particularly dramatic or use an unusual gimmick. For example, there have been live episodes of the likes ‘ER’ and ‘Will And Grace’, while ‘Medium’ did a 3D episode, ‘Seinfeld’ had an episode that ran backwards, while a few shows have also done musical one-offs. While to British eyes they seem utterly random, in the US they’re done as sweeps stunts to try and artificially increase viewership during those key months. Likewise, this is when the biggest guest stars are likely to turn up, show crossovers are more likely to happen, or there’ll be particularly enormous cliffhangers.
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