Down the tube

Attention: college students, especially male ones. Television needs you and your 18-35 year-old middle class brothers. Network programming is dying this fall season, and the blame is being placed soundly on the shoulders of the young male viewers. They seem to have disappeared, leaving programming executives, and their advertisers, wondering how to cope.

Ratings for this fall have been lower than expected across the board for every basic network. FOX and NBC have been hit hardest by this disappointing trend, as each have had to cancel new programming that was expected to garner high ratings. Because of the surprisingly exciting and financially successful baseball playoffs, during which FOX ran countless promos for the shows Skin and Tru Calling, the network estimated high ratings for these new shows. Advertising rates are based on these estimates, and now that FOX has been unable to match them, it will be forced to provide hours of free advertising to their clients.

Rupert Murdoch's network has since cancelled Skin, the modern-day adaptation of Romeo & Juliet starring Ron Silver, and never even aired Luis, a new vehicle for character actor Luis Guzman (of Traffic). To make matters worse, two shows that were expected to carry the brunt of ratings in case these shows were unsuccessful, the second edition of Joe Millionaire as well as 24, have also failed to reach ratings expectations.

In hopes of rectifying the situation, FOX has hastily thrown early replacement series on the air, like the hapless Norm MacDonald project A Minute with Stan Hooper. This was analogous to hoping to put out a fire with vodka.

The sole bright light in the seemingly endless row of failed programming is The O.C.; FOX can only pray that it will live as long and be as successful as the show it is most often compared to, 90210.

Yet perhaps the biggest shocker of a failure this season has been NBC's highly anticipated comedy Coupling. After a resounding success in Britain, NBC executives felt that the show could be equally lucrative stateside, with the same exact scripts but different actors. The result? A gigantic flop. Anglophiles can only pray that American hands will keep far away from the current BBC comedy The Office.

In the classic Hollywood style of ignoring the product itself, network execs have taken to blaming the Nielsen ratings system as the root of the issue. Nielsen holds a virtual monopoly on ratings services and in spite of its outdated and elementary system for gathering data, it has been able to hold onto this position for years.

The antiquated process of writing down what shows Nielsen viewers watch in "log books" is tedious at best, say network execs. As the number of television junkies (many of whom are young viewers) turn to DirecTV Tivo, and other high-tech cable providers, the Nielsen ratings will stray increasingly far from the actual number of viewers.

Nielsen, in its own defense, has thrown out a few paltry excuses. The most interesting of which attribute the low ratings to Hispanic viewers. In hopes of having the demographics of Nielsen families greater reflect the nation's diversity, Nielsen made a concerted effort to add many Hispanic families. Accordingly, they apparently watch less television than white or black families, and are one cause for the lower ratings.

More speculation cites that the rise in popularity of the internet, video games and DVDs have had an adverse effect on the amount of male viewers. But it is not as if these distractions suddenly popped up last August, thereby hindering this season's ratings. Guys did not just find out that they could search for porn online or play Madden for hours on end. Maybe they are just doing it more now because there is nothing good to watch on television.

Brotherhood of Poland, N.H., The Lyon's Den, and Skin are just three examples of the junk being jutted into the eyes of television watchers on network television. It is no wonder that many cable shows, like Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, are garnering increasingly higher ratings. Don't expect relief anytime soon though. If these shows were supposed to be the best of the offerings, how good can the mid-season replacements possibly be?