UPN's season sinks like a rock

UPN's season
sinks like a rock

Blame much on faltering once-hot 'Enterprise'

By Kevin Downey

    The new broadcast season is proving to be a humbling one for UPN.
   The Viacom-owned network’s audience is down a pride-swallowing 28 percent, to an average 4.2 million viewers, and its adult 18-49 rating is down 37 percent compared to the first week of the new season last year.
   Moreover, the rating for its primary adult 18-34 audience is down 26 percent.
   “Last year was ‘Enterprise’s’ first season and it started off extremely well, but as the season progressed it started to decline,” says Steve Sternberg, senior vice president and director of audience analysis at Magna Global USA, who predicted earlier this year that UPN’s audience would tumble this season.
   “Wrestling had been declining on Thursdays and we figured it would continue to decline opposite very strong competition on NBC and CBS.
   “And we figured the WB would be very strong with ‘Gilmore Girls’ and ‘Smallville’ on Tuesdays, which would hurt UPN’s ratings. So, it wasn’t very hard to come to this conclusion.”
    UPN is not only trailing the WB, which it raided last season for “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” one of its biggest hits, but is suffering as its rival is going through a 48-percent surge in its year-to-year audience.
   While one week of ratings do not make a season, UPN’s initial performance is troubling.
   Much of UPN’s declines have been pinned on the disastrous second-season premiere of “Enterprise,” which was down 62 percent from the series premiere last year. That episode had 13 million viewers and ranked as that week’s No. 29 show.
   The second-season premiere was UPN’s second most-watched show two weeks ago, but its audience of fewer than 4.9 million people ranked No. 75 out of 99 programs on the major broadcast networks.
   UPN’s problems go beyond “Enterprise,” though.
   Its two new one-hour programs, “Twilight Zone” and “Haunted,” are failures so far.
   And four of its five nights are doing worse than they did last year.
   The exception is UPN’s Monday lineup, including the new sitcom “Half and Half,” which the network says is posting ratings increases over last year in every major demographic.
    On Tuesday last week, “Haunted” lost 37 percent of “Buffy’s” season premiere audience of nearly 5 million people.
   Although “Buffy’s” premiere was down from last year’s 7.7 million people, the show is still strong and fell only one-tenth of a point behind UPN’s top-rated “WWE Smackdown” and “Enterprise” in the 18-49 demographic.
   While “Enterprise” is having its share of problems, its second episode at least proved it isn’t in a free fall. It essentially held onto all of its premiere audience.
   “The Twilight Zone” is having major trouble, however, at 9 p.m.
    The show lost 27 percent of “Enterprise’s” lead-in audience last week and, competing with the season premiere of NBC’s “West Wing” and the finale of CBS’s “Big Brother 3” last week, was down 23 percent in its second outing.
   “We thought there would be a falloff there,” says Sternberg.
    “Anthology type programs traditionally don’t do that well. It’s not appointment viewing in the sense that it’s not the same cast and same story every week. ”
   On Thursdays, “WWE Smackdown’s” audience is down roughly 6 percent from last year at this time.
   With an audience of 6 million, “Smackdown” is still UPN’s most-watched show and is competitive considering the tough competition on NBC and CBS.
    UPN’s Friday is given over to movies, which tend to have audiences that fluctuate wildly, depending on the feature and what’s playing on the other networks.
   Last week’s movie, which was bumped in some parts of the country for baseball, was the second-least-watched program on network TV with an audience of less than 2.1 million.

-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.

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