How One Decision Can Stop TV Shows From Finding An Audience

Television is an extremely complex medium, and can require considerable work from specialist agencies in order to create anything of broadcast quality.

This is, of course, only half the battle. Creating something is an exceptional accomplishment, but ensuring it reaches a captive audience is quite another, and without enough of a regular, sustained and engaged viewership, a television show is doomed to failure and cancellation.

What makes the process so fraught with challenges is that every creative, marketing and production decision matters, and there are several shows that have become infamous for failing due to one fatal decision.

Can Miscasting Stop A TV Show From Finding Its Audience?

In 1979, NBC decided to create a spin-off of the popular detective series Columbo aimed at a female audience. Given the popularity of the series Murder She Wrote just five years ago, this was not an unwise plan.

Unfortunately, Mrs Columbo’s biggest mistake was in a casting decision that raised unfortunate questions amongst fans of the source material.

Casting Kate Mulgrew as an investigative journalist was inspired, but the problem was that she was 24 when the show aired, and audiences who were fans of Columbo worked out that she would have been just 12 when Prescription: Murder, the first Columbo episode, aired.

Despite attempts by NBC to undo this connection no less than three times in the 13-episode run, the audience did not improve, and the show was ultimately cancelled.

Can A Devotion To Authenticity Stop A TV Show From Finding Its Audience?

When producing a period drama, a degree of dedication to authentically portraying that era is essential to ensuring that the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief and engage with the drama of the show.

One of the reasons why Netflix’s 2017 series GLOW was so successful critically and with audiences was that it managed to capture the late 1980s and the pseudo-pantomime of professional wrestling with enough verisimilitude that the audience buys into it.

However, it is possible to over-commit to authenticity in a way that can alienate an audience, and this has been cited as a reason why the otherwise critically acclaimed comedy series Freaks and Geeks.

It first aired in 1999 but was set in 1980 with period-accurate music, costuming that completely eschewed the neon-tinged stereotype of the 80s that has endured since, and a particularly brown-tinged soft focus more accurate to the suburban experience of the time.

All of these elements were critically lauded but unpopular at the time, as it would take at least a decade for 80s nostalgia to become popular in television, and another five before the likes of Stranger Things showed there was a market for the wood-panelled version of the era.

Can Dubious Production Decisions Alienate An Audience?

In 1979, The Love Boat became a massive success for ABC, partly for its exotic setting, partly for its extensive use of guest characters thanks to the cruise ship concept, but mostly because it used that setting to largely hide that the show largely used studio sets rather than the Pacific Princess itself.

There were multiple attempts to replicate the success of The Love Boat that led to some of the most bizarrely unappealing television to audiences in the history of broadcasting.

Possibly the most infamous of these is Supertrain, which, despite its extensive model shots and ludicrous nuclear-powered gigantic high-speed train, was not a Snowpiercer-style science fiction show but a version of The Love Boat on a train.

It was such an expensive production thanks to its huge railway model, but its atrocious ratings nearly led to the bankruptcy of NBC, as whilst the sets were lavish and the train itself impressive in a Thunderbirds or Power Rangers-esque way, the show itself was poor and lacked either the guest stars or the heart that made The Love Boat work.

The BBC (which famously paid as much as £25,000 per episode but did not show Supertrain) had the opposite problem with their TV series Triangle.

Aiming for a more realistic soap opera style, the BBC filmed their series on a North Sea ferry service, but travelling from the port of Felixstowe near Ipswich to Gothenburg was not exactly a glamorous, exotic East Asian or Caribbean cruise.

Infamously, lead actress Kate O’Mara (more famous as Doctor Who villain the Rani) had to shoot a scene where she sunbathed topless on a day that looked grey, miserable and particularly cold.

Had they shot the series in a studio, the concept might have been salvageable, but instead it has gone down in history as one of the worst TV shows the BBC have ever produced.

How Can A Television Production Avoid Alienating Its Audience?

• Understand what an audience is looking for with a particular genre, medium or timeslot.

  
  

• Research every aspect of a new idea before committing any budget to filming.

  
  

• Respect an audience, without either patronising or leaving them confused.

  
  

• Know when to be bold with production concepts and when to remain conventional.