Given that my work experience has focused in broadcast television, albeit in the Central America market, I have decided to dedicate the first entry of this blog to the latest Fall television season in the United States.

I have recently become a fan of TV By The Numbers (TVBN); an excellent site focusing on U.S. TV ratings. TVBN has an excellent page titled the Cancel/Renew Index in which they analyze shows’ cumulative ratings for the current season (2008-2009), and predict which shows will be renewed or canceled. This analysis is based on an index of the average audience to the average audience for all shows on its network.

Show average audience / Network average audience = Show audience index

Since advertisers are mostly interested in people aged 18 to 49, TVBN assumes that programming decisions will be based on the ratings for this demographic, and therefore bases the index on the18-49 LIVE+SD rating, which is the amount of people aged between 18 to 49 who watched a program while it was broadcast live, or on a time-delayed device such as DVR until 3:00 a.m. local time. According to TVBN’s analysis based on last season’s trends, if a show indexes less than 0.92 against the other shows on its network, it is likely to be canceled.

Inspired by this performance comparison, and I decided to organize ratings information into another format, a BCG Matrix, which is a traditional business analysis used to compare a company’s products or services by charting their market share by their growth.

The chart is normally used to focus on a single company. I collected data on 40 difference programs; below are the plotted results for the 18 shows, that stood out as good examples within each sector.

• Stars (Yellow, upper right-hand corner): 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, The OT, Two and Half Men. Clearly these are the big winners this season. They have strong ratings and are growing strong over last season. These five shows are about the only ones that made it into this part of the matrix. Not too many shows were exhibiting positive growth combined with ratings above 3.75 in the 18-49 demographic. Also note that none of these shows hit the same ratings mark as the big cows such as Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy.

• Question Marks (Orange, upper left-hand corner): Gossip Girl, Supernatural, 60 Minutes, 20/20 Friday, Bones. These shows are hot and growing in popularity, but they are not Top 10 shows.

• Cash cows (Green, lower right-hand corner): Dancing With The Stars, Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, House. Although big winners since many of them are in the top ten, these shows are starting to lose their appeal, or are losing ratings because of other factors such as a time-period change such as in the case of House.

• Dogs (Red, lower left-hand corner): Prison Break, Dirty Sexy Money, Deal or No Deal Friday, Pushing Daisies. These shows are in danger of being canceled, or as in the case of Pushing Dasies and Dirty Sexy Money, already have been.

This matrix analysis would be more accurate and probably more useful if it were realized on an individual network basis, but the effects would be more or less the same excepting the CW- Gossip Girl and Supernatural would probably show up as stars on an individual CW matrix.

What can be construed is that comedies are growing greatly over other shows this season. This is natural given the current economic situation, and the escape and relief that audiences are seeking. What is also evident is that top-rated dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes and Desperate Housewives have stagnating ratings. Perhaps more laughs and lighter subject matter would improve their ratings.