Washington Post reports on late night television ratings for the first week of the strike

According to the Washington Post, apparently the strike is having an effect on the late night numbers, as everyone figured it would. I’m sure that on any rerun week of any show – late night talk show or otherwise – the numbers do drop. While I’d like to think that the audience is choosing en masse to support the writers by not watching the reruns, the truth is that new episodes bring in lots of viewers, and reruns don’t. So hopefully no one over at Viacom will let this rattle their cages too much. This news from the Washington Post makes me sad, though.

And here’s my story. I was flipping through TV last week and saw an episode of TCR rerunning – I believe it was the Sean Penn one – and I just couldn’t bear to watch it. It made me sad for the writers and sad for the crew and sad for Stephen and it just made me want to cuss at the AMPTP for being so rude to the people who help create the shows. I’ve never been a confrontational person, and this whole strike mess is just upsetting to me, to be quite honest. We do our best here at NFZ to bring you the most updated news we can about the strike, but it quite honestly pains us to do it. We want it over.

Bad News for Leno, a Plus for Letterman
By Lisa de Moraes
Friday, November 16, 2007; Page C07

…

And yes, when final national numbers for last week’s late-night shows came in yesterday — it takes Nielsen that long to spit out late-night numbers — “Nightline” gained about 300,000 viewers to 3.8 million, while Leno’s “Tonight” show plunged by about a million viewers to 3.9 million, and Colbert skidded from the previous week’s 1.4 million to a scary 829,000 viewers.

But that’s kids’ stuff. Here’s the news: David Letterman’s overall audience with reruns was on par with the previous week with original episodes — 4 million viewers. And he gained eyeballs in TV’s key demographic groups, including the Holy Grail — the 18-to-49-year-olds.

Yes, David Letterman’s CBS late-night show in reruns, not “Nightline,” won the first week of the writers’ strike, pretty much any way you want to slice it. He won among viewers of all ages; he won among “Nightline’s” target news demo of 25-to-54-year-olds; and also in the talker’s target demographic, the 18-to-49-year-olds.

The prevailing theory is that Leno’s audience, which had already seen his episodes’ kitschy monologue and fawning interviews, migrated over to Letterman’s episodes, which, to paraphrase an old NBC marketing pitch to viewers when it (and the other broadcast networks) began jamming repeats into every non-sweep month of the year, were “new to you” since those viewers hadn’t seen the episodes the first time around.

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