Hasta La Creative!

When appraised through the lens of the Nielsen ratings, there is nothing particularly eventful about TV’s so-called “event series,” and yet the networks’ collective mania for the format seems unlikely to subside.

Industry argot for self-contained shows with story arcs that unspool in uninterrupted 8-to-10-week bursts, event (or “limited”) series are designed to satisfy a preference for close-ended narratives while minimizing the number of encore hours a network has to program over the course of the 35-week broadcast season. Trouble is, most of the events have failed to catch on with viewers.

Of the six new limited series that have aired since the season began, none has averaged higher than a 1.5 rating among adults 18-49. (As each ratings point represents 1% of the 127 million TV-owning Americans in the demo, a 1.5 equals about 1.9 million advertiser-coveted viewers.) The least-watched among these half-dozen newcomers in terms of total viewers, Fox’s “Gracepoint,” was canceled on Dec. 15 after averaging just 3.64 million viewers during its 10-episode run. The lowest-rated, NBC’s “The Slap,” has averaged a 0.8 in the dollar demo through the first seven of its eight scheduled installments.

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