American Viewer: Hit TV and How to Make It
'Popular' shows and films are not what you think
Editor’s note: This is the final entry in our series revisiting potential knowledge gaps in Hollywood, post-election, around the American audience and how best to program to a broader base. Our earlier pieces addressed insights about age, race and gender; money, religion and politics; Bicultural Latinos; the heartland, and cross-generational viewers.
Herewith, our final ESG deep dive in this series on the American Viewer. The original below first appeared Sept. 9, 2022, but as you’ll see, the data largely holds up:
Sometimes it feels like the streamers — or the people running the streamers — are making the types of shows they want to watch and just sort of hoping that America changes its viewing habits, rather than making shows that conform to the tastes of most Americans.
To make shows Americans want to watch, you have to know who your customers are. Which has been the point of this entire series. The entertainment company (traditional or disruptor) that figures this out will have a leg up in the streaming wars.
As I wrote earlier, this American Viewer series was partly inspired by Matthew Yglesias’ articles on “popularism,” a controversial political theory that politicians should say and run on popular things (Yglesias argues for this from the center-left). That probably doesn’t sound controversial to most people, until you get into specific political issues, and then everyone gets angry at each other — mostly on Twitter. (And as I argued earlier, Twitter isn’t real life.)
I’m a “popularist” when it comes to TV content. I think studios, streamers, networks and others should make “popular” shows and films. On the surface, this doesn’t sound controversial; obviously, the more people who watch a streamer’s shows, the better!
In practice, though, many streamers — unburdened from the pressure of delivering ratings until only recently — make a lot of unpopular shows, but consider them successful if they win awards or feel “buzzy.” Even though I stated that I wasn’t factoring in critical acclaim in my “Which Streamer Has the Most Bombs in 2022?” series, the biggest complaint I got from corporate comms people afterward was that I did not factor in buzz and acclaim!
I’m not saying there’s no place for buzzy, prestige TV shows and films, but that place is much, much smaller than most people in Hollywood think.
I wrote three previous installments that examined the average American Viewer and how they watch TV. Now we move to the last part: what types of shows are actually popular.
In this edition, you will learn:
Just how much bigger the NFL is than anything else
But also how surprisingly big awards shows are too
The state of sitcoms and true crime
Procedurals and reality data on broadcast . . .
. . . and what genres are working on streaming