Broadcasting & CAble’s Marissa Guthrie has CNN’s Bart Feder spinning like a top…
Parker/Spitzer – the first chapter of CNN’s primetime makeover – bowed Monday to a barrage of excoriating reviews:
Time: “vapid”
Baltimore Sun: “a load of obnoxious, self-important noise”
The Guardian: “wretchedly unwatchable”
St. Petersburg Times: “confused,” “odd and ill-focused”
New York Times: “hard to watch”
Bart Feder, senior VP of programming at CNN/US, is taking the long view.
“Critics do what critics do and their aim is to get page views and sell newspapers,” he told B&C on Friday.
I can’t speak for the others but not me. I have nothing to sell and I don’t make a dime off the blog so the panning of Parker Spitzer’s opening night disaster by me has nothing to do with that. It’s just makes it easier to digest the notion that critics are out to get you because that’s their thing than it is to digest the possibility that the show really was that painful Monday night. We call that rationalizing.
“We honestly believe that as people sample the show they’ll fine it refreshing and interesting and they’ll come back. Cable shows don’t premiere with huge audiences,” he says. “They grow over time. And that’s been true of our competitors and that will be true for us too.”
That’s both true and not true. Some shows do premiere with big numbers and then tail off into obscurity and get cancelled. The shows that don’t get big numbers usually aren’t heavily promoted in advance. Countdown with Keith Olbermann falls into the latter category because it was kind of a soft launch and it took years for it to “find itself” and become the show that’s now so loved and reviled. Other shows however that do get advanced promotion and a lot of it do tend to get a big opening night number. MSNBC had both Donahue and Rita Cosby turn in good numbers for the network (at that point in its history) on opening night. Both shows got cancelled though only Cosby’s could be considered a ratings related death.
The point: Considering all the promotion that’s been going on for this show; not just on CNN, but all the stories written about it on blogs, trade sites, newspapers, and magazines, the opening night low number is not something we can easily dismiss as just the usual growing pains. No, it’s significant that viewers wouldn’t check out the opening night in a bigger number considering all the hype the show got. It’s not a good sign and Feder knows it.
But I will keep checking in on Parker Spitzer periodically to see if I see any improvement in the program which would justify a new blog post on the subject.
At the end of the article Feder puts down his top and picks up an Ouija Board and starts channeling the CNN ghost of Jon Klein…
“We have a great brand. We have an outstanding network. We do the best job of anyone in television covering breaking news,” he says. “Clearly we want to put on a primetime schedule that will bring people to the set night after night when there isn’t a lot going on in the world. That’s our objective. With Piers Morgan coming onboard and with Anderson Cooper, we’re very excited about a strong consistent primetime lineup that we think will bring new energy to cable and will impact the ratings positively. Otherwise we would be doing something different.”
Setting aside the usual CNN puffery about branding and all let’s get to the central point about “a strong consistent primetime lineup”. It might have made a difference prior to last week but MSNBC has now raised the bar with The Last Word. If O’Donnell’s numbers keep pummeling AC360 at 10pm like they are now, and that’s not guaranteed at this point, CNN’s primetime climb out of 3rd just got much much harder…
