ESPN's Monday Night Football Is Eating the Launch of Broadcast Shows
A little advice for the people who program the broadcast networks: maybe it's time to rethink the strategy concerning Monday night. There's this thing called cable -- maybe you've heard of it? -- and it's starting to have real impact on what used to be one of the stronger viewing nights of the week for broadcast. The show that's doing the majority of the damage is ESPN's Monday Night Football, which, particularly this year, has been formidable, often getting beaten only by ABC's Dancing with the Stars. (Yes, Monday night is a win-win for parent Disney (DIS).)
And yet, if you ponder network spin or look at ratings as much as I do, you'll notice the networks often operate as though cable is still a parallel universe. Thus, Monday night on broadcast this season is jam-packed with shows the networks have high hopes for, like NBC's political thriller The Event, CBS's Hawaii Five-O and ABC's Castle, scheduled as though there weren't often upwards of 15 million people otherwise occupied. Per The New York Times, with the exception of Dancing with the Stars, all network shows are getting damaged by Monday Night Football, though some of the ratings for scripted fare are recouped once time-shifted viewing is factored in. That's helpful, but it's still a pretty shaky backup strategy.
So how bad has ESPN's Monday night rout been? Monday's Jets vs. Vikings contest had 17.5 million viewers, but that was only the program's second best performance of the year. The game scored a 7.1 rating in adults 18 to 49. Hawaii Five-O had a 3.1. For whatever reason, football is more popular now than it has been in years. Two of ESPN's four top ratings performances for Monday Night Football have happened so far this season. (This is the fifth season since it moved over from ABC.)
Still, whether the NFL is going through a period of enhanced popularity or not, network TV needs to get over its cable blind spot. The difference between the two is becoming more and more minimal every day, but still, the evidence that honchos see cable and network often as two different things are everywhere. This even extends to how cable and broadcast ratings are covered, with the two seldom being mentioned in the same breath.
That habit hearkens back to the fact that the cable universe started small and is still smaller, but given the numbers cable is doing against broadcast, that shouldn't matter. What do viewers care about? That the game's on. Period.
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