Now comes a TV critic with the plaintive question: Do Scripted Shows Still Work for Summer? By and large, the answer seems to be no. The fractured audience for summer fare in the zillion-channel universe makes the economics for costlier scripted fare look dicey, to put it mildly.
The linked article points out that Under the Dome, a Steven Spielberg production, debuted with 13.5M viewers in the summer of 2013. The show ran out of steam and got cancelled after three seasons. Then came Zoo in the summer of 2015 with an 8.2M viewer debut. That effort also met the Nielsen reaper after three years.
The top scripted series for this summer - the article calls it a "bright spot" in what seems like very faint praise - is Take Two, which debuted to 3.4M viewers. You may detect a downtrend here. In fact, Take Two's latest ep got 3.1M viewers, which was less than half of what Celebrity Family Feud got earlier in the week.
The more I look at the numbers in the article, the more I wonder why the broadcasters don't just go to wall-to-wall game shows and reality series in the summer. (They can throw in some reruns, too.) The networks may be well on their way to such programming already.
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