madmikeee
Sr Member
This.
I think it's a tough balancing act, really. You want to get as large and audience as fast as possible to bring in the ratings. Towards that end, there's the temptation to do standalone episodes with no real connection between them. This means that someone can miss a week and tune in later to get caught up without feeling baffled and lost. On the other hand, if all you are is some boring "monster of the week" show....well, who really cares?
I think you need to have a balance of the two. Grimm, I think, did a good job at this in its first season, mixing long-running threads and one-off monster-of-the-week stuff. The second season will likely go more heavily towards stronger arcs, but I guess we'll see.
Part of what I think changes the dynamic, though, is the particular network's online presence. I know that I got caught up on Grimm episodes entirely online. Not even on-demand, but on my PC. A lot of studios probably don't take that into account -- if you put up your whole season, you don't need to worry about "casual viewers." Just let folks catch up online and make sure your show runs ads online when you do. This, I suppose, is one of those "the industry's really changing fast" issues.
Another issue is with the current Nielsen ratings. The Technology is 60 years old for chris'sakes. They blame DVR's and On Demand for faulty ratings data when in fact it is because they refuse to get with the program. It would be almost NO effort to employ small data gathering programs within the satellite/cable providers to gather anonymous usage statistics from the customer base. Basically data would be sent back from your box saying "Box #AF4356 currently has the following 10 shows DVR'd and has watched these 3 shows On Demand." Then report those ratings.
Maybe if they actually figured out that the 30,000 viewers they saw were actually 75,000 because of DVR and On Demand they wouldn't cancel great shows and replace them with Wrestling or yet another moronic reality show.