Liz Shannon Miller May TV Sweeps

The May TV Ratings are underway! American Idol is calling it quits while Jane The Virgin is a huge hit on The CW. But how will television do now that Netflicks and Hulu are playing a creative game? From Hollywood...and the iHeart Radio Studio I'm Unplugged and Totally Uncut with Liz Shannon Miller. The May sweeps period is the final push from networks to get us to watch their shows. So — what exactly is it and why is it so important for the viewers? It has been eight long months. Our DVRs are full of shows we’re weeks behind on. We’ve seen new shows come (welcome, Fresh Off the Boat, Black-ish) and we’ve seen shows go (Manhattan Love Story, Red Band Society, we hardly knew ye). There is about one month left in the season, including what’s known in the industry as May sweeps. So what is Sweeps? It’s about a two-week event that happens four times over the course of a television season, this being the fourth and final, after one in September, November and February. It’s the time television networks will do big final pushes — often involving Wacky Ideas and Shocking Deaths — to get eyeballs on their programs. Sweeps is used as a Nielsen measurement tool (albeit one often taken with a grain of salt nowadays) for studios and advertising agencies alike to evaluate who is really watching what. And, because this is 2015, they want to know not just what viewers are watching, but when (this is where Live+SD, Live+3, Live+7 come into play) and how (live, DVR, online streaming, TV, Xbox, laptop). “But wait,” you say. “I thought Nielsen measured that stuff all year?” To that, we say, don’t get us started on the severe shortcomings of Nielsen measurements. That’s a different article for a different day! For now they rule the ratings and measurements world. Onward! Let’s take a look at why May sweeps is important this year, what it means for next television season, and what we’ve learned so far in the 2014-2015 TV season. May sweeps immediately precedes Upfronts seasons. Upfronts are the Super Bowl of television-advertising sales. Literally. The Super Bowl annually sells tons of ad space there. A marathon bidding and selling process, television networks and studios tout their Fall (or occasionally, next Spring) line-up of shows, and in some cases, big-name celebs. Then, agencies and brands determine where they want to put their advertising budget. It’s kind of like gambling — you can’t predict what shows will be a hit with the audience (great! You’re getting your money’s worth) and which will bomb (oof — people will be scrambling to make sure your ads are placed on similar programs). If a show is suddenly revived during May sweeps — maybe a new marketing strategy got people interested or there’s a special episode to bring in different/new/more viewers — networks may look at that as a piece of the pie when deciding to renew or cancel. Love him or hate him (the Hypable staff is indifferent) @TheCancelBear does a usually-accurate reading of what shows are D.O.A., on ‘the bubble’ or ‘likely to be renewed.’ A press release announcing a 13-episode order next season for a show that was chugging out 22 this season is usually not a great sign, but people say (and, more importantly, hear) contradictory things about the status of shows hourly. It’s the voices that cut through it all that are heard. These are the ones who decide the fates of television. This past season, we saw what might be the first of its kind: an online streaming platform picking up a show a network dropped, then airing weekly installments of its episodes. We’ve seen entire shows picked up by platforms from dropped networks. But when ABC canceled the abysmally-rated Selfie after just a few episodes, Hulu swooped in, bought the remaining episodes, then released them on a weekly basis as if the show were its own baby. Will this happen again? Maybe. Cougar Town had a healthy run on TBS after being dropped by ABC, but Enlisted, despite a strongly vocal, small fandom, was canceled by FOX and was unsuccessful finding a second home. The facts are plain and simple: television’s landscape is different than it was five, 10, 15 years ago. Empires season finale last month “averaged an eye-popping 6.5 rating,” according to Josef Adalian at Vulture, but at the height of NBC’s reign, Friends season 2 ratings averaged a cool 19 in the coveted 18-49 year old adult demographic. These numbers, like currency, can’t be measured equally without adjusting for inflation — there are more households and hundreds of thousands more screens people are watching on. Ideally, people would watch television live, their eyes glued to the screens for the entire hour, so the network gets their program seen and advertisers get a chance to sell their product. The fracturing of demographics, and increasingly niche programming, that, admittedly, some nets have swapped in favor of shows with wide-appeal, makes it difficult to reach an advertiser’s target audience. In this case, they can turn to a show like The Mindy Project to talk to their 18-49 female audience, and can place an ad on a sports game later in the week to reach men. This not only costs more money for the advertiser, but the networks have to deliver on their promise to get a certain amount of people watching. If they don’t, some contracts stipulate that the network has to air the ad again in alternative time slots until the reach that threshold. (This is really getting into the nitty-gritty of advertising. If you want to talk more about it, email me.) May sweeps technically began April 23, this past Monday, which is why it’s no coincidence that Grey’s Anatomy episode aired this past Thursday, or that the revelatory Jenner interview aired on Friday. Expect more must-see moments continuing throughout the month until May 20, when the shows all come to and end, and we wait another four long months until our favorite time of the year: season premieres. Liz Shannon Miller is the Los Angeles-based TV Editor at Indiewire, and has been talking on the Internet about television since the very beginnings of the Internet. After studying film at USC, she worked for two years as a staff writer on G4's "Attack of the Show," wrote dialogue for the U.S. Army, covered the online video world as a tech reporter, served as web editor at Variety, and has been published by the New York Times, Comedy Central, The Wrap, Nerve and Thought Catalog. She is also a produced playwright, a host of podcasts, and a repository of "X-Files" trivia.