May 12: Renewal & Cancellation Prospects For Your Favorite Shows

The Renew or Cancel Index is updated on a weekly basis, if you're reading this after May 19, 2009 click here to see the latest post.

I've broken each network's data for scripted shows out into its own separate post to keep the discussions more on topic, find them at the links below.

CLICK THESE LINKS TO SEE EACH NETWORK'S SCRIPTED SHOWS:

ABC:  Renewal Chances For Castle, Cupid, Ted, Samantha… 

CBS:  Renewal Chances For Christine, Cold Case, Gary, The Unit…

CW: Renewal Chances For Reaper, The Game, Chris, Privileged 

Fox: Renewal Chances For Dollhouse, Terminator, Sit Down

NBC: Renewal Chances for Chuck, Medium, Law & Order, Earl… ·
----------------------------------------------------------------

UNSCRIPTED SHOWS FOR ALL NETWORKS

For unscripted shows, the results from last season were far less cut and dried. A similar relationship did seem to hold between 18-49 averages, but some unscripted shows survived with very low numbers. My conclusion was that some unscripted shows must be so cheap that they are expected to do little more than fill air time and produce little in the way of viewership. Since we, and you, don't care much about unscripted shows, and the Index isn't all that good in predicting their future, I don't worry about predictions, but here is the data for reference.

The Index now uses the 18-49 rating, which simply is the percentage of the US 18-49 TV adults population. (There are an estimated 132 million US adults 18-49 in TV households, so a 1.0 rating is equal to 1.32 million adults 18-49). Since we only get 18-49 demo ratings for each show on an overnight basis, that makes the values in the Renew/Cancel Index easier to compare with the overnight demo ratings results.

 -

Nielsen TV Ratings Data: ©2009 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.

All ratings are Live+SD.

We found that last season, the future of a show was nearly directly related to its adults 18-49 average viewers divided by its networks 18-49 average viewers. Many other factors may matter, but they all seemed to boil down to that one number. Last season, if a show had better than 92% of its network’s average 18-49 viewership (0.92 in our index) it was pretty safe, below that level it was in danger.