Rupert's Minions continue on a roll with cartoons:
Animation Domination on Fox continued to live up to its title on Sunday. The net’s popular cartoons won the night among adults 18-49 (2.7 rating/7 share), as well as teens and all male demos, according to preliminary ratings. After a rerun of The Simpsons at 7, American Dad earned a 2.0/6 and 4.2 million viewers, followed by an original of The Simpsons (2.8/8, 6.3 million), Bob’s Burgers (2.2/6, 4.8 million), Family Guy (3.3/8, 6.5 million) and The Cleveland Show (2.6/7, 5.4 million).
This bodes well for employment in the sector. (As long as they can get the busy, busy Seth to come in for recording sessions and keep episodes humming merrily.)
The question I continue to have is: Why does Fox find success with this type of programming while every other network this side of Adult Swim continues to shy away from the format? Come on, alphabet broadcasters! Step up!
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11 comments:
Well, WB network (now merged with CW) did try several prime-time cartoons a while back ("Baby Blues", "Oblongs", "Mission Hill"). None of them even made it through the season.
WB gave up on their shows before they even had a chance by burying them on Friday or Saturday nights, switching time slots continuously and without notice and generally failing to promote them.
Don't forget the fox "cartoons" glen beck, bill o'rally, and shawn hannity...a laugh riot, and some of the best fiction on tv!
Fox has the zombie-cult cartoons--Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad--that its viewers watch to celebrate the "club" status of watching, and which stay on for reasons regardless of quality.
(Just try asking a FG fan why he thinks it's funny...You end up getting a little too much personal information, and still wonder what the appeal of the show is.)
WB, etc., made the mistake of thinking the shows were popular by themselves, and copied the wrong ingredient--The shows.
I think it's because Fox already has The Simpsons to anchor the night. I'm not saying that people only watch for it, they don't, but a cartoon is far more likely to get watched in a block of other cartoons than put with a random sitcom in the middle of the week. The same audience that watches the shows on Fox Sunday tend to watch the others on it as well, or at least have a passing interest in them. It gives the cartoons more of a boost. There is still an animation age ghetto, the same people who love sitcoms might scoff and change the channel if a cartoon comes on, whereas toons can thrive in a toon-rich environment.
Adult Swim can consistently launch new shows because people will watch them as 'something new from Adult Swim.' That doesn't happen with regular TV... though out of curiosity, what were the ratings for the Lions show Dreamworks did for NBC awhile back? I remember it doing well, just not well enough to justify its budget. I think it made it through a whole season too...
When is Fox going to decide on "Bob's Burgers?" Their numbers don't look good.
Fox is very smartly run network no wonder why they are tops.
I thought Father of the Pride did poorly in the ratings, after the pilot aired, due to word-of-mouth killing it. People watched it expecting a family show (due to it being "from the creators of Shrek") and instead, the humour was more in the Family Guy territory.
Wasn't sad to see it go, though. Terrible show.
Yeah I looked up Pride after writing the earlier comment but couldn't find hard numbers for its ratings, just the 'its not a kids show' complaint. It did air all but one episode, I think, in it's regualar timeslot, which feels somewhat more forgiving than how most shows show up for a week or two then dissapear. That even happens to Fox shows that don't preform post-Simpsons.
To be honest the only fluke I can figure in the 'already popular animation favors more animation in its block' is Archer on TBS, which managed to do fine on its own. Besides TBS, Fox, and CN I think the only other network that has cartoons for adults is Comedy Central (South Park, Ugly Americans, Futurama). I could be wrong but I think the only show they've shown that wasn't put on right after South Park was Futurama, and that had a built in fan-base... we don't know for sure whether Futurama is coming back for another group of episodes yet though after the summer.
I'm amazed that some people don't find FG hilarious. But then, maybe it's because I'm in my fifties. Many of the jokes are poking fun of the 70's or early 80's, and some people may not understand the reference.
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