Love for Raymond (and Friends) Will Last
Everybody Loves Raymond
On Monday CBS aired its last rerun of
Everybody Loves Raymond. Last year
Friends and
Frasier left NBC. In the new TV season that starts next week,
Will & Grace will be heading into the prime-time sunset, and we'll all wonder what happened to the network sitcom.
According to a new study from media ad-buying firm Magna Global, people are watching more comedy on TV than ever. In the 1994-95 season, a TV household watched an average of 4.14 hours of sitcoms per week. This past TV season, that average was up to 4.58 hours, but compared to 20 years ago, the bulk of that viewing is now on cable. Viewers are spending an average of 2.19 hours a week watching comedy on cable and less than an hour per week on the broadcast networks. They're also spending more time watching syndicated repeats of network hits.
Maybe it's so hard for new sitcoms to launch because networks are competing with the bounty of great shows they launched in the '90s. "A lot of great comedies that left the broadcast [network] airwaves are still on television," says Magna Global analyst Steve Sternberg. "Viewers are still watching Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond in fairly large numbers. It makes putting something on broadcast to draw those viewers all the more difficult because [new shows are] still being compared to those great comedies. In other words, as viewing options proliferate and the shelf life of classic comedies is extended by many years, it is far more difficult for new sitcoms to catch on."
What kind of shelf life is he talking about? TBS recently made a deal to keep the cable rights to all nine seasons of Everybody Loves Raymond through the year 2016. That's around the time Chelsea Clinton will be old enough to run for president. TBS has also extended its rights to Friends through 2017, but starting in 2011 Nick at Nite will get the exclusive rights to air the show after 6 pm.
And cable networks are willing to shell out big money to keep classic sitcoms because new hit comedies are so scant. Since 1989, the season that Seinfeld debuted on NBC, the networks have launched 472 sitcoms. Out of those, 74 made it to four seasons or more, which is the typical amount needed to go into syndication. And out of those, just 12 became hits in syndication — a rate of 3 percent.
Sternberg subscribes to the theory that network programming goes through cycles and that once a new sitcom breaks through, it will usher in more. "Comedy viewers haven't disappeared," he says. "They're just biding their time, happily watching the comedies they've loved for years — just waiting for a new one to join the club."