‘New Girl’ season 2: Nick and Jess buildup pulls in huge DVR figures
Just in case you were wondering, there still is a pretty large audience that is watching “New Girl.” Unfortunately, many of them are deciding to do so via DVR rather than actually catching the show live.
For the episode of the Fox comedy that aired on January 15 (which was two weeks before the kiss that changed everything), TVbythenumbers reports on Monday that there was a 74% gain in 18-49 viewing in the seven days that followed the episode airing. For those new to the TV business, this is known as “live+7” data. The show originally scored a 1.9 rating in the aforementioned key demographic, but ended up finishing with a more-than-impressive 3.3 once the final numbers were configured. (“New Girl” also added over 2.2 million viewers to finish above the 5.86 million mark.)
So why aren’t more people watching this show live? This is definitely something worth asking, but it is also a question with a pretty complex answer. The “New Girl” viewing audience tends to be fairly young, so one suggestion may simply be that this a generation that likes to do things on their own time rather than make appointment viewing to a TV show. There was not actually much reality competition a la “The Voice” or “Dancing with the Stars,” so you can’t make the argument that these people were instead watching shows that they needed to know a result to right away. The “New Girl” numbers are ultimately more similar to cable, where you typically see shows gain 70% or more in DVR viewing after the fact thanks to the younger audiences and the heavy competition.
What “New Girl” represents to us is a representation of how primetime network TV is changing, and how there needs to be other measures taken into account in order to monetize scripted programming in particular better. It’s harder for a show like “New Girl” to get live viewers compared to an “American Idol,” but that does not mean that the show’s audience is small.
What do you make of this phenomenon? If you do want to see what is next for Nick and Jess moving forward on the show, you can do so over at the link here.
Photo: Fox