Week Two of “Dancing With the Stars” on GSN Continues to Dive
Viewers of GSN may not have to live with Dancing With the Stars much longer, if the executives are paying any attention to the ratings. Week one was an ominous start but not a disaster. It’s become a ratings disaster in week two. The off-network reruns of the popular ABC dancing game show are proving anything but popular for the network where traditional game shows tend to do the best. The show lost over a quarter of its audience from the debut week.
Here are the exact viewing figures for each day. The stats include the ratings position for the week compared to all the other shows on the network, the time slot, the number of viewers, and then we throw in the average for the day, the percentage lost from last week, and what percentage of its lead-in Dancing With the Stars lost.
Friday, January 27th
176: 6:00PM to 8:00PM : 150,000 viewers
062: 8:00PM to 10:00PM : 264,000 viewers
119: 10:00PM to 11:00PM : 211,000 viewers
163: 11:00PM to 1:00AM : 163,000 viewers
178: 1:00AM to 3:00AM : 149,000 viewers
202 : 3:00AM to 4:00AM : 84,000 viewers
Friday Average: 170,000 viewers (First Friday the show appeared on, replacing Flashback Friday)
Lead In: Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, 230,000 viewers; Loss of 35%.
Saturday, January 28th
161: 6:00PM to 7:30PM : 167,000
070: 7:30PM to 8:30PM : 254,000
086: 8:30PM to 10:00PM : 240,000
105: 10:00PM to 11:00PM : 228,000
142: 11:00PM to 12:30AM : 187,000
162: 12:30AM to 1:30AM : 166,000
195: 1:30AM to 3:00AM : 99,000
198: 3:00AM to 4:00AM : 88,000
Saturday Average: 179,000 viewers; Down 26% from previous Saturday’s debut weekend
Lead In: The Newlywed Game, 315,000 viewers; Loss of 47%
Sunday, January 29th
199: 1:00PM to 2:30PM : 85,000
204 : 2:30PM to 3:30PM : 76,000
187: 3:30PM to 5:00PM : 122,000
169: 5:00PM to 6:00PM : 156,000
Sunday Average: 110,000 viewers; Down 37% from previous Sunday’s debut weekend
Lead In; 1 VS 100, 218,000 viewers; Loss of 60%
So it’s pretty clear it’s not going well at all. I’d have to imagine we’d see some pretty drastic cutbacks since the show has no positive outlook, but we’ll see. I don’t think anyone expected it to do out-of-this-world numbers, but I don’t think anyone expected numbers this bad.
Source : The Voice of TV
GSN needs to take this as a hint: people don’t want reruns of reality competitions…they want REAL game shows!
I was worried about that. Start off bad and it’s a downward ride to hell but it didn’t have to be the case.
If you were GSN, all you could hope for was a surge in ratings for week 2 and there might’ve been a chance of that but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. The viewers have spoken and GSN is living a nightmare of epic proportions. In B4 firings.
Again no word on renewals yet and Dancing, which did provide some new to GSN content for a little while, is making the network look mighty ugly expecially during a time when GSN is a free preview for Dish Network this month. I never saw this show before but took time to actually watch it. I only hope in the future GSN makes wiser decisions because another move like this would destroy them. Life goes on.
it’s shocking that the “DWTS” repeat ratings on GSN may have suffered the same fate as it were a week earlier when it debuted on GSN. if the DWTS reurns doesnt work out on GSN at some point. GSN should need to do in the future by either 2 options:
- have classics during the daytime with Orignals and Modern Acquistions airing in the primetime
- divide itself into 2 different channels with the help from Challenge TV and FremantleMedia (1 network for classic game shows and 1 channel for modern acquistions inculding GSN Orignals) so it show most of the Game Shows(from United States, United Kingdom and Austraila) that have seen or never been seen on GSN before
I’m not really reveling in this. GSN is in a potentially fatal catch 22. If they yank it, then heads do indeed have to roll; you don’t pay big bucks for ten seasons of show and a boatload of ads and then not even do a month of shows! On the other hand, if they ignore ratings and continue the heavy push, they lose too.
There’s an old saying whose basic premise is that doing the same thing and expecting different results is foolhardy. They keep trying these reality/competition shows (I won’t bore anyone with specifics; you know what they are/were), and they always fail. Eventually, you’d think they would learn to stay away from these shows and create/buy shows that fans are willing to watch.
Knowing their history, though, I expect the comedy of errors to continue.
“If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you will be doomed to repeat them,” so a wise man once said.
It was GSN’s fault for acquiring the show in the first place. Now they have to live with the consequences. From what happened last year, I can tell you that GSN will most likely pull an Improv-A-Ganza here. Frankly, I would be surprised if Dancing was removed from the schedule before September 2012, because GSN likes to milk shows for all they’re worth. So even though the ratings are bad, just like with Improv, they will most likely keep Dancing on the schedule until 10 months from now, when they’ll finally get rid of it.
Don’t get me wrong, GSN will reduce the airings of DWTS, but from what we’ve seen in the past, they won’t get rid of it entirely until almost a whole year has passed from when it started…
You’re probably right. I have to agree because of the Improv example you gave (and to a much lesser extent, the even worse Love Triangle). They’ll probably pull back about April/May-ish and then let it quietly die away with no fanfare. They’ll pick an already-abused show to take its prime spots, and the network will drag on.
Wanna know why it’s failing? From the looks of it (since I honestly haven’t watched or even paid attention to GSN in about 3 months), they’re airing this thing like 6 times in a row per day. Now using basic thinking skills you’d think that’d be enough to make one completely sick of seeing the same show time and again, but cable networks do this very often these days and see fine ratings for it so this is obviously not true. What is true though, is that these are RERUNS of a show that better than 10 million people ALREADY KNOW THE OUTCOME OF!! It defies all logic to treat such a show this way! The show started off last week at close to 350,000 then slowly dwindled as rerun after rerun aired. People got tired of it, figured out quickly that there are better uses of their time, and CHANGED THE CHANNEL. GSN stuck to their guns and tried this redundant marathon system of airing these not-so-old reruns once again this past weekend, and suffered for it because they don’t learn. Now if this were airing once every night, it might do fairly well, but what they’re doing now is nothing other than abuse.
I am a self-admitted fanboy of GSN and game shows in general, so I obviously do want them to succeed. If I have to deal with DWTS or whatever over-sexed reality rerun have you to keep GSN in tact, that’s fine. I only wish they’d treat treat this thing that they spent so much time, money and care acquiring and promoting with the respect it needs to succeed. If they don’t (and as it seems, they ain’t going to), all that effort and funding gets flushed down the crapper, never to be seen again.
What was GSN realistically expecting? I’m not being facetious when I ask that.
I don’t blame them, necessarily, for going after a high-profile, highly-rated network show that–in essence–fits the game/competition model they are marketing. But didn’t the failure of Fox’s defunct Fox Reality Channel prove that there’s not a huge market for reality TV reruns? Seriously, who is going to watch a five-hour block of a predetermined dance competition that aired not that long ago, let alone watch it in primetime on the weekend?
If anything, GSN should rerun DWTS during weekday afternoons. With the daytime landscape littered with generic talk/court shows and soap operas being forced off the schedules, a counter-programming option like DWTS would make for a decent daytime alternative; particularly since you would be targeting a crowd that may not typically tune-in to the prime time version. If nothing else, the general family-friendly tone of the show, along with the B- and C-list celebrities (a game show staple if ever there was one) would make for comfortable afternoon viewing. And DWTS, in its own way, has a particular sense of drama involved. Going from the daily crises during an hour of “General Hospital” to watching the backstories and eliminations on DWTS Monday through Friday isn’t that big of a leap. I’d imagine many folks who followed their favorite now-cancelled soap operas would choose DWTS over “Jerry Springer,” et. al. I may be wrong about that (and you certainly wouldn’t get the 18-35 year-old demo) but GSN could at least save some face by keeping the show on their schedule in daily rotation and it would likely generate some audience for them instead of the hemorrhaging it’s currently doing to their numbers.
Stacking DWTS reruns in primetime and trumpeting it as Event Television was a bonehead move and I’m sure there will be much hand-wringing at GSN regarding that decision. My personal two-cents is that they should reposition the show in daytime to try to lure viewers in during the afternoons. Granted, no one probably cares about the midday numbers at GSN, but DWTS might be able to generate some heat there. Better that than being left in the cold all weekend.
If I’m not mistaken, this is a documented phenomenon which experts call “What The $*#& Did You THINK Would Happen?!”
Is there a chance that the most of the people enticed by Dancing with the Stars tuned in initially expecting them to show new content and then clicked off because the realized its reruns.
If that’s the case…I fear for humanity. :-D
How is it that any person with half a brain knows that these shows would not do well in reruns but the geniuses running GSN didn’t? It’s not that it’s not a game show or that it’s not being scheduled with any sort of common sense. It’s that anyone who wants to watch Dancing with the Stars has seen the show and doesn’t want to watch it again! Goldhill and company keep making one bad decision after another. How are they still there?
If GSN does not take off Dancing With The Stars, I will destroy my TV.
Then be prepared to destroy your TV.
GSN-just concentrate on three things that keep you alive
1. Original programming (The Newlywed Game, Baggage, Lingo)
2. Acquiring classics and modern game shows
3. Online gaming
I’ll destroy your TV for you and I’ll only charge you $20 to do it. :D
This is the result of GSN’s new schedule:
I no longer watch GSN on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays.
I’ll destroy his TV for $14.95 plus shipping and handling. :-D
I almost forget sometimes that they devote the weekends to dancing, but then I check the clock and quickly cancel the numbers on the remote. I’m proud to say I have avoided every second of this show. Yeah, I’m that nerdy. :-D
I stopped watching GSN ages ago, and doing so makes me look like a genius. IMO, there’s been nothing really worth watching on that channel for, like, five years or something like that. How they manage to stay on the air is beyond my comprehension, especially with newly-acquired reruns of a popular show hemorrhaging in the ratings.
I couldn’t agree with you more Mark in Montreal – this network doesn’t give a damn about the game show genre – they are all about masking reality programming and poker in the guise of being a game show when they obviously are NOT! I haven’t watched the network since the end of 2010 when the episodes of “Card Sharks” and “Pyramid” were going through the third cycle of repeats, and frankly, I don’t plan on watching it again until someone who DOES care about game shows runs the network and gives the shows the respect that they deserve. GSN filled that boat when they first arrived in 1994, but not anymore – they are just a sham of a network that I hope goes away soon!
They need to bring back Flashback Friday in some form pronto…I believe it was actually doing better ratings from what the pyramid figures show. My one advice for that is since it’s a friday marathon, do it not in order but in a “best of” format…so one week the funniest eps of MG7x (School Riot, Dawson refuses to Smile etc)…The next week a 100k pyramid tournament….the next the best eps from dawson feud…The next, eps from Jenning’s streak bookended by his first win and his final defeat, etc (I forget what they own and don’t own thanks to changes but they still have a vast library to choose from) I think that may work…Nick at Nite did that briefly (especially with I love Lucy) and it was successful…I’ll say it…it can’t be worse!
If they do, you’re just going to get whatever has been repeated ad-nauseum. GSN has the idea that anything which won’t substantially increase ratings isn’t worth the investment (with the exception of DWTS, which is bombing anyway). The shows they’re running now could’ve been replaced with different episodes long ago if they wanted to. Evident that they’re just not interested in spending money for that.
(now if you suggest another DWTS marathon, I’ll bet they’ll be all ears for THAT!)
As far as I know, they only got Dawson’s “Feud”, “Match Game ’74/’75″, “Card Sharks” (1978-79 and 1986-87 eps), and “Pyramid” (1985-86 for 25k, and 1987-88 for 100k) – SURELY they could have used some of that money to get the FULL series of each, if that’s all the classics that they are going to show these days!
Have you noticed the bug on the screen often promotes a “new” episode? Anyone who thinks they’re going to get something new is going to be pissed off when they see a 5 year old rerun. More stupid marketing from the idiots running GSN.
I thought I was the only one that noticed that. They did the exact same thing when they picked up Daytime Deal or No Deal. GSN has to realize that their viewers are not as stupid as they think.
This is a BIG mistake by GSN. The ratings and viewers will drop week by week until it reaches a big ZERO.
I hope the more youthful women-targeted sponsors who signed on to this pull out fast… Don’t get me wrong, I want GSN to bring in some money, but I seriously want to see them get BACK to what they were best at – traditional game shows. Not holding my breath, but still, one can hope…
John Charles Patrick Croghan Daly and Thomas Garrison Morfit III could really do some good right now. Why or why are they not participating?