by Robert Mead

Created on: May 21, 2007

Will "Medium" Retain Its Viewership when NBC Moves Its Time Slot to Sunday Night?

Most TV Shows Never Recover After a Time Slot Move. How Will This Time Slot Change Affect the Ratings for This Critically acclaimed Supernatural Thriller?

The NBC television network is in trouble. They have sunk in the network ratings to the #4 spot for the past two seasons. When a network becomes desperate, they are prone to making dumb decisions. Moving a highly-rated and critically acclaimed TV show like "Medium" from their comfortable time slot of 10PM on Wednesday night to a Sunday night time-slot of 9:00 PM does not do anybody any good. The viewership of "Medium" has gone down some this season as opposed to their stellar first season in 2005, but that is accepted in most cases as long as the advertisers are attracted to the demographics of the show. And in "Medium's" case, the demographics are just what most advertisers are drooling after; the TV show's main viewers are 25 to 48 year olds with disposable income. So why is NBC making this ignorant move? Because they believe the lead-in from "Sunday Night Football" will be a great way to build the audience for this female-driven supernatural show.

Whether the network made a mistake with this move will become only clear in January 2008, because that is how long the fans of the show will have to wait for new episodes. The positive side of delaying a show until January of a new year is the fact that there are virtually no repeats during the shorter run of episodes. This strategy has benefited shows like "Lost" which turned off millions of viewers after the first season when people got tired of seeing repeat after repeat instead of new episodes, which led to complete confusion as to what was happening to the main characters. This strategy could be a major benefit to "Medium" as well, since most viewers had no problem waiting for Season 3 to start on January of 2007. On the negative side, viewers who were accustomed to seeing "Medium" every Wednesday night at 10 pm now have to look for it on Sunday night at 9pm and change their viewing habits as well, which is never an easy task for a television show to do.

"Medium" has never really had an easy time of it when it comes to schedules. It started out its second season not even knowing if it would return because NBC did not include it in its fall schedule of 2006. It was only announced a few months later that it would return in January of 2007 to little fanfare. That really shows you the

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>