Tedium - Dead On A Friday 📺

Today in Tedium: I have this memory of the one period in my life where I wasn’t sure if I could make it on my own. It occurred in the winter of 2006, when I had just departed from a bad roommate situation and was waiting for a good one to open up. The result meant that I spent like a month in an extended stay hotel. (I don’t recommend it, but it got me by.) I had a decent job, but it was far from anyone I really knew. Plus, my laptop had just died. I was not thriving. But I had one thing going for me back then: A moment I consider My Olympics. It was February 10, 2006, the greatest single night in television comedy history. That was when not one, but four episodes of Arrested Development aired back-to-back-to-back-to-back in a moment of binging that would predict the show’s future as a streaming favorite. My favorite television show of all time ended its run against the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and I honestly could not have cared less. In a way, Arrested Development had been dumped into the Friday night death slot, murdered by a network that did not understand it. Today’s Tedium considers why broadcasters dump shows on Friday nights. — Ernie @ Tedium

— Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., the president of the ratings firm A.C. Nielsen, in a guest essay for the Associated Press, published in July 1964. The essay notes that even at this juncture, the system had gained a reputation as a show-killer.

Star Trek, one of the first notable recipients of a Friday night death slot, in an issue of TV Guide.

What about Fridays makes it such a good dumping ground?

In a lot of ways, it’s important to consider motivations with television programming. Creatives have the motivation to produce the best, most creatively fulfilling works they can. Meanwhile, television executives have to maximize their investments, knowing that they want to create the most attractive circumstances for advertisers, which will be more likely to spend more on advertising against a hit rather than a flop.

Demographic considerations could shift this factor somewhat—a show with a small but desirable audience might be worth more than one with a large but

Let’s say you have a show that has a passionate audience, but just isn’t pulling in the numbers to make it a worthy option for keeping on

When you have a series that you consider a problem child, a great way to get rid of it is to isolate it from the rest of your lineup, where few people will be likely to see it.

Judy Lynn Benjamin, the editor of Galaxy magazine, a science-fiction title, was one of the first to make this association between Friday evenings and low ratings among the public on January 28, 1968, in an interview with The Kansas City Star. The subject? Star Trek, the most infamous example of a television show treated poorly by its network. She suggested that the reason the show was performing poorly was because it aired on Friday evenings in its second season. She described the reason for this as such:

Friday night is a bad night and the time period is a very bad hour. Most of the audience is made up of teenagers and young adults and when do they go out? Friday night!

Hard to argue with that. But it didn’t help that, in its third season, the network pushed the show to the 10 p.m. Friday hour, an hour that ensured that the kids that generally watched the show were probably already in bed.

The thing is though, the “death slot” hasn’t always been the domain of Fridays. For years, it was widely believed that Sunday evenings were one of the worst spots to be on television. In 1966, Andy Williams lamented his show being moved to the 10 p.m. Sunday slot by stating, “The thing that convinced me that moving my show to 10 p.m. Sunday is a good move is that they said do it or you don’t go on.”

Williams ultimately stayed on the air for a few years longer, cutting his appearances at one point, but the time slot did not prove the death knell that he initially believed. (Perhaps this is because Sunday now has the reputation of being the best day to watch TV in prime time, at least in the U.S.)

The first mention of a death slot I can find at all came in 1962, in a UPI obit for legendary television comedian Ernie Kovacs, which states it like this:

Among the many shows he had and left was the “death slot” opposite Milton Berle, then king of TV, and whose party he attended minutes before he was killed.

But getting back to Fridays, what about them earned them this reputation above any other day of the week? You might be interested to learn that people actually watch more television on weekends than weekdays. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people watch an average of 3 hours 19 minutes per day on average on weekends, versus 2 hours 32 minutes on weekdays. But

Nonetheless, since at least the middle of the 2000s, most networks (CBS excluded) have embraced the idea that it just ain’t worth scheduling any fresh scripted content during the period anymore. Perhaps the network that best exemplifies this lesson is Fox. The network famously only airs two hours of prime-time programming most nights, rather than the more common three. The result is that shows that might have made sense for the 10 p.m. hour end up having to compete for space earlier in the evening.

Or they might get pushed to Fridays, which is what frequently happened to shows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Were you a fan of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. in 1993? Hope you had a VCR+ or the ability to clear your schedule!

The greatest example of this was Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which premiered during the time period and suffered greatly at the hands of network meddling, with its original pilot airing months after the show had already premiered. This show, more than any other, reinforced the idea that Friday nights schedules did irreparable damage to good content. It took a while for the network to figure it out, but Fox eventually realized that maybe they should just air sports or wrestling on Fridays instead, which is what they do now.

Still though, there’s no reason that Fridays need to be seen as a dead zone, a way to repeatedly destroy the goodwill of science fiction fans in a matter of months. And one show in particular shows what happens when networks bother to try on Friday nights.

Red Foxx and Demond Wilson in Sanford and Son, perhaps the most popular Friday program in television history. (Columbia/via IMDb)

The show that proved that Friday nights didn’t have to be ratings wastelands

Norman Lear was a television legend, but he was also a wizard, making ratings hits in places others wouldn’t dare. All in the Family, during the bulk of its run (and the entire period during which it was the top-rated show on television), aired on Saturday nights on CBS. The show only moved from that prime spot because of the controversial Family Viewing Hour, never recovering its dominant ratings perch, though the series and a direct successor remained on the air for nearly a decade afterward.

(When was the last time you remember watching a memorable program on a Saturday that wasn’t cheap reality or newsmagazine fare? The answer to that question: The Golden Girls.)

And likewise, Norman Lear also had a direct hand in another megahit of the period, Sanford and Son, which he helped adapt from the British show Steptoe and Son. (All in the Family? Also a British comedy adaptation.) It’s not often that British resets actually work out well in the U.S. market (The Office aside), but Lear seemed to have a gift for it. In Sanford’s case, the reason it worked was in large part because of Redd Foxx, who was basically impossible not to watch in that show.

Some highlights from Sanford and Son, in case it’s been a few decades since you’ve seen it.

At the time, Fridays were broadly used for comedies on the lineup of the three major networks, but Foxx had a reputation as a very raunchy comedian, which made Sanford stand out. While most of the “blue” stuff was kept out of the show, it retained enough of Foxx’s vibes that he became one of the biggest sitcom stars of his era.

(Also helping: It was a show with a primarily Black cast at a time such a thing was uncommon on television.)

And the show turned out to be a mega-hit. Even though the show didn’t even premiere in every single market operated by NBC, it was good enough to be one of the biggest hits of the entire week upon its premiere. And it kept up that success: At the height of its run, it was second only to All in the Family.

Yes, we once lived in a world where the two most popular shows on American television aired on Saturday and Friday, respectively. Its success at 8 p.m. on Fridays undermined many of the criticisms lobbed at the Friday time slots just a few years earlier, when Star Trek couldn’t make it work at either 8:30 p.m. or 10 p.m. All those people supposedly partying or at the movie theater made Sanford and Son appointment viewing in a way Star Trek never was.

In fact, Sanford was such a good lead-in that by the mid-1970s, every single show on NBC’s Friday lineup was a top-15 hit. That’s right. In 1974, NBC’s Must-See TV day was Friday.

In some ways, it comes down to context and product. Fridays were good for broad comedies and dramas—but not necessarily for philosophical science fiction. I think NBC really harmed Star Trek by failing to understand who the show would appeal to, and the result was a show where ratings and audience never properly connected during its initial run.

There have been later eras of Friday success, of course. Starting in the late 1980s, ABC found a way to make it work by putting two hours of family comedies (including, notably, the introduction of Steve Urkel) in the 8 p.m. hour, then the newsmagazine 20/20, a lineup the network branded as TGIF.

But if it makes the executives of that era feel any better, all the other executives of every other era have mistakes just as bad on their permanent record.