Lead-ins and How They are Helpful (and Hurtful)

If there is one thing that is always important about lead-ins to a new show is that they could provide all of the pull they need to in order to keep people watching the next new show. But a weak lead-in could provide the exact opposite affect instead. Do lead-ins provide all the power? And what if you are the way the network starts out the night? Are you certain to have things last?

Perhaps the biggest gamble is how each network starts out the day of the week at 7 Central (or 6 for some of the networks at least part of the year, if not all of it, on Sundays) since they are betting that this will be the most popular or watched of all the shows they could be airing at the time. Thus, you will often not see new shows then. But this is not always the case. Some networks have very few things to rely on or timeslots that they have open so they have to put new things on at the earliest timeslot at times because not much else can work or go there.

Needless to say, regardless of how you start the night, you want to make sure that you have a strong enough show that people won’t change to another network once it is over. Such a simple thing is worth putting a lot of effort into each network’s shows. Thus, if you have a strong show like The Flash at the start of the night, you would want something after it so the CW network is constantly putting new shows on after it hoping that the ratings would help as a result.

Sadly, a show may be strong, but not produce good ratings on the show after this. The most notable example of this is The Voice which tends to always have good ratings and continue going strong, but it is not a show that most other NBC shows want to air after as there is too much competition on other networks at the time and the post Voice timeslot is often poison to new shows or even some of the existing shows that are on the air after it.

That is why lead-ins are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they can help a show out. On the other hand, they can drag a show down. The Voice is the only show that I know of that doesn’t provide that strong a lead-in despite being a strong show itself. I can’t think of any shows offhand that add viewers in the later hours after a poor lead-in. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. I just don’t think that there is one that exists right now that I know of at least.

The annual event of The Super Bowl proves the ultimate test of just how good a lead-in can be. There have been shows that aired for the first time after that show just for a ratings boost. If the game ends up airing late and long, then it is harder for viewers to stick around and watch it. But it will always be a habit for all networks to air something new after the game is over. Most others then air a late night show, except for FOX, obviously, since it has none.

Without must else to say in this blog post, I will let you go and continue these posts in the future. This is the last regular Tuesday post for a while, probably, depending on what happens. The regular posts should hopefully remain on Thursdays and you will be seeing them on other days of the week as well as usual as you hopefully want to see if that means that I wrote a Survivor blog post since every time I roll and see an episode of that show, I have to update this blog unless I would have anyways, at which point this blog would not be updated, in case there is anything confusing you about it. I know that this is quite a complicated and confusing way of doing things and things could get even worse if the new blogger way of doing things stays the way it does for me or better instead. We’ll see.