so I woke this morning (as I do most Sundays with the clock radio
spewing the propaganda of 51
Percent. (weekdays we listen to WHUD
for the local traffic) While in a half awake state I herd a discussion
about the role of women in media and one factoid tipped me into
alertness.
DAWN TARNOFSKY-OSTROFF, the current president of UPN came there from Lifetime, television for women
Not sure If I herd it correctly, I checked with The
Oracle and found that she was brought on in
the hopes that the network can extend its audience reach for more equal
numbers of men and women
And this got me thinking, in the context that UPN has
Officially Canceled 'Star Trek: Enterprise'. (official
document) Could there be a
connection ? I mean I think the show has it's problems. But I
really feel that The
Forth Season Has really gotten into a grove. While Enterprise has
taken longer to get there than DS9
and TNG (I don't
believe Voyager Ever found
it's voice.) Enterprise was finally getting good. Why would they cancel
it now?
I had remembered that star trek was UPN's best rated show. but in
putting together these notes, I realized that it was actually voyager
that
was the ratings anchor for the fledgling network 10 years ago. Sure
the Enterprise's
Rantings are in decline, but how good could the rest of the
programs on UPN be doing. Yahoo
shows UPN with nothing in the top20. I found More complete
ratings data but that data is not broken down by network. I
read the list, and could not identify any UPN programs in the top 106
Above enterprise and that page gives the whole UPN network a rating of
"No.6 UPN 1.1 No.6 UPN 2,920,000" so even if there is another UPN
program in
that list (unless I'm reading it wrong) Enterprise is doing BETTER THAN
AVERAGE for all UPN programs. Why would you kill a program that is
Doing
better than most of the crap you have on ??
Not to mention that they put it into a killer time slot this
season "Friday evening" I mean, even geeks have lives. You put
something on A Friday or Saturday night if you need an excuse to
kill it. that or you put it up against a popular show. I've
got a Homemade
TIVO so it
doesn't matter
to me, when they put it on. but clearly only a small percentage of the
population have TIVO's or are into "aggressive" VCRing as I used to be
before I built the TIVO. ( I used to have 5 or 6 programs scheduled to
record each week, and I had to plan ahead as to when to change tapes.
Even then I rarely watched programs "live" and skipped commercials )
So what I keep getting back to is "why would they ( she) kill it ?
And my conspiracy theorist alter ego starts putting together
theories. The one I like this morning is that Dawn Ostroff, a
fanatical womyns activist deliberately put enterprise in a bad time
slot, and now is using it's "poor , only when when compared to other
networks" ratings as an excuse to kill it.
Now I suppose that it's possible that the show is much more
expensive than other UPN programming and the network can't afford to
continue to run it. But that's really flawed logic, If this show is in
fact the Anchor of the network. Without viewers there, they can't even
promote other programs they have ( ones that might be more profitable)
In our household, we only watch two programs on UPN. I watch Enterprise and my wife watches Americas top Model Thats it.
Either they just don't want me a part of their demographic or
they just don't get it.
They are never going to grow their network by killing off one of the
best products they have.
Replys:
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