telemovie ratings - the real story behind the figures?

[cyberquiff]

Okay. this is controversial to some.
But let me qualify.

I am a BIG B5 fan.
I liked LOTR too.

So I'm not coming at this negativly.

I believe that the ratings were poor for the telemovie because there simply are not the viewers there.

I'm based in the UK and JMS always said that relatively speaking we got more viewers than the US (hence all the VHS copies of the series)

Even so. the ratings were still way below Farscape, Stargate or the nasty ST word.

I seem to remeber what a struggle it was for JMS to persuade Warners to bankroll the series every year and how he put a positive spin on the figures.


Am I being harsh here, or do the viweing figures acurately reflect the audience perhaps?

Dan

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[PillowRock]

Well, that would imply that there was a strong regional bias with West coast areas having a much larger interest / market for Rangers than the rest of the country.

That happens for sporting events (which always get much better ratings in the areas that the teams come from) and some other live events where the time difference makes a big difference in TV's in use (East coast asleep or West coast still at work). Other than those, I think that this kind of split according to time zone / satellite feed is pretty rare. I could, however, just not be well enough informed about the regional breakdowns of other shows.

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[Jomar]

Those of us who post on this board are pretty rabid fans of Babylon 5. It's three years since the series ended and we still talk (write) about it every day. I don't know how many fans post here and at the SCIFI BB but I'm sure at best it is in the low thousands. To get a good rating a tv program needs an audience in the millions.

I understand why football took precedence over a science fiction movie. Fans want to see it as it happens, I know because I've been a football fan in the past. A tv movie of any kind is a fictional story that can be shown again at any time. It was pure bad luck that TLaDiS ran against one of the biggest games of the year and I'm sure it skewed the ratings. If there had been no game a percentage of those viewers would have watched the movie. However if they had been true fans they would have taped it.

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I always seem to be diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

 

[PsionTen]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> I believe that the ratings were poor for the telemovie because there simply are not the viewers there.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think the position that KoshN was taking and, to a lesser extent myself, was that a damn good telemovie -- one that made you go WOW -- might have sparked a resurgence into the B5 fan base. But I definitely think the audience is out there, you just have to capture their imagination.

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"Dawn's in trouble? Must be Tuesday." -- Buffy Summers, "Once More With Feeling."

 

[KoshN]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PsionTen:
I think the position that KoshN was taking and, to a lesser extent myself, was that a damn good telemovie -- one that made you go WOW -- might have sparked a resurgence into the B5 fan base. But I definitely think the audience is out there, you just have to capture their imagination.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think that even a "damn good telemovie" would have gotten smashed in the east by that football game. A lot of B5 fans would have missed it because of that.

The difference is that a damn good telemovie would be stirring more word-of-mouth buzz among people who'd never seen B5 before, and it would be provoking lots of "unqualified" praise (i.e. praise without the qualifiers) and word-of-mouth buzz from the B5 faithful.

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KoshN
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Vorlon Empire

http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/

 

[Kribu]

Since the topic is about the Rangers movie ratings, I'm going to send it over to the Rangers forum.

You might want to check out the other threads dealing with ratings as well, since there have been plenty of possible explanations given and discussed there.

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"Isn't the universe an amazing place? I wouldn't live anywhere else." - G'Kar, B5: Rangers
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