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TELEVISION WHAT YOU'RE WATCHING.

NOV. 12 2015 9:00 AM

Nothing’s a Hit AnymoreIn the streaming age, the way we calculate ratings has become nearlymeaningless. But they matter more than ever.By Willa Paskin

Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photos by Thinkstock and courtesy AMC/Amazon/FOX.

hit TV show, never easy to make, at least used to be easy to identify. Throughthe end of the 20 century, a hit was a show watched by tens of millions ofpeople, if not many more. You know what happened next. The explosion of

content, offered by cable networks, premium cable networks, streaming serviceproviders, video games, and the greatest attention grabber in human history—the

th

Internet—fragmented that audience into millions of pieces. In 1995, NBC canceled TheSingle Guy, airing in the plum spot between Friends and Seinfeld, after two seasons: Ithad an audience of 20 million. This year, NBC’s Blindspot has been one of the broadcastnetworks’ few new hits, with about 8 million viewers.

Willa Paskin is Slate’s television critic .

Ratings mavens will point out that the 8 million calculation isn’t exactly fair: It doesn’tinclude the number of people who watched Blindspot within three days of the showairing (L+3, short for “live plus three days”), or within a week (L+7), or within threeweeks, or anyone who watched on a phone or tablet. (The final two metrics are notcurrently measured by Nielsen, the company that compiles ratings for the TVindustry.) According to NBC, if you combine all those numbers, Blindspot’s ratings arebasically double what they appear to be.

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But now I’m worried: Did you make it through the above paragraph? As ratings havegone down, they have gotten increasingly esoteric, using such complicatedmeasurements that they may as well be spells cast to conjure missing eyeballs. Themajor networks are by no means the only magicians around. Wade through ratingsinformation, and for every straightforward smash like Empire, The Walking Dead, orThe Big Bang Theory, you will find five times as much data about L+3, L+7, and Twitterengagement. You will read boasts that a show is a network’s best ever performingdrama, though it is the only drama it has ever aired; that it is the second bestperforming season in the series’ history; that it is the best performing episode everamong people age 19 to 24 who make more than $50,000, live in a city, really likehummus, and have tattoos they will eventually come to regret.

WILLA PASKIN

And even with all this slicing, dicing, and checking between the couch cushions formissing data points, networks care about much more than the number of people whotuned in. They are looking at buzz and prestige and loyalty. They are considering thepassion, devotion, affluence, and youth of a show’s audience, and how much it usessocial media. The networks are noting how cheap the show is to make, whether theyown it, and if they want to be in business with its creator. They are wondering if theshow they are contemplating airing instead will really do better. Considerations likethese are why shows like Girls, Hell on Wheels, and Mysteries of Laura have gotten tomultiple seasons despite small audiences.

And then there is Netflix, who keeps it simple by refusing to share any ratings data atall. Netflix (and to a lesser extent Amazon) is the real alchemist, the magician who, bywithholding ratings information altogether, has turned its every show into a possiblesmash. (This particular trick can be called Schrodinger’s Netflix Account.) Netflix hasbecome the predominant prestige brand in the country, behind only HBO, on thestrength of a slate of bingeable series of varying quality watched by who knows howmany people, or how few.

Perhaps Netflix’s strategy strikes you not just as cagey, but welcome. If Enlightened,Terriers, and Lone Star had premiered on Netflix, and not HBO, FX, and Fox respectively,they would all still exist. Good riddance to ratings, which have never been a reliablegauge of quality, and have lately become opaque and meaningless, thanks to all thedesperate finessing outlined above. If almost nothing is a hit anymore, why shouldn’t ahit be whatever we say it is?

But that “we” is exactly the problem. This may sound grandiose given the besieged,piddling, and vanishing nature of Nielsen numbers, but ratings matter because ratingsare a rejoinder to egotism, a tether to reality. Ratings keep us—barely— frommistaking our interests and our taste for everyone else’s, at a time when it has neverbeen easier to conflate the two.

It is a commonplace to lament the way that technology has fragmented the collectivecultural experience. Once, we had no choice but to watch the same shows in the sameway. Now, we can choose to watch thousands of different shows in a variety of ways.But while this lamentation is grounded in objective reality, it has no standing in our

subjective ones. Taste is more specific than ever, and yet it has never been easier tofind hundreds of thousands of people to discuss any specificity via social media andthe Internet. The mass experience has all but vanished, only to make room for nicheexperiences that feel mass.

Consider, for example, contemporary TV culture, in which the shows that are mostdissected, discussed, recapped, obsessed and fought over are only occasionally highlyrated. The Sopranos was a hit for HBO, but The Wire was not. Game of Thronescommands a large audience, but Mad Men never did. Scandal and Empire aresmashes, but Smash was a hate-watch fetish object of the very few. The Office was ahit, but 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Rec all struggled in the ratings. FridayNight Lights scuttled from home to home. If passion and buzz correlated with ratings,Girls would be the most popular show of all time.

In the absence of ratings, we are left to imagine that we, whomever we happen to be,are the only people watching. In the last few decades, as advertisers have fixated onthe demo—that is, the portion of the audience that is 18 to 49 years old—networkshave ceased to care about viewers older than 49. Those eyeballs don’t count. And soCBS is denigrated as a channel for old people, and in 2011, beleaguered NBC canceledHarry’s Law, with around 10 million viewers, because most of those viewers were out of

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36 Comments Join In

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ratings are for selling ads. not to help you decide if you are cool or not. thats why netflix needn'tbother. More...

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the demo, and, therefore might as well not exist. If you’re wondering why there is nomodern day Golden Girls, or why all the modern day Golden Girls feature much youngerwomen, that’s the reason why: because we don’t include old people in the ratingscalculus. Would Scandal have been taken seriously, would it have inspired so manyother diverse shows, if we didn’t know it was a hit? Or would it have just beenmarginalized as a zany soap opera for women and especially women of color? Thankgoodness we don’t have to find out.

It has never been easier to live in a bubble, or, to use the term of art, a silo, of a coupleof million people who are into whatever you are into. It’s fun, it’s opinionated, andthere are lots of hilarious GIFs in that bubble. But it’s important to remember—evenjust fleetingly—that this bubble is in fact a bubble. That, despite whatever yourFacebook page tells you, many Americans are voting for Donald Trump and that themost popular show in the country is NCIS. Ratings may be an increasingly meaninglessmetric, a blunt instrument with hit or miss taste—but sometimes they still tell thetruth.

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