(Ray Mickshaw/FOX) - Because of postseason baseball, Fox has been changing “X Factor’s” broadcast schedule with little notice — which hasn’t helped ratings.
“The X Factor” finally heads into its live competition rounds next week, with one more contestant than expected — and far fewer viewers.
Five weeks into its first season, Simon Cowell’s singing competition for Fox is averaging 12 million viewers. That’s not the ratings behemoth that Cowell anticipated last summer, when he told a trade publication before the premiere that he’d consider anything fewer than 20 million viewers a “disappointment.”
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Pulitzer Prize winner, Peabody recipient, Medal of Freedom honoree -- Lisa de Moraes is none of these, but she is an authority on the bad direction, over-acting, and muddled plot lines being played out in the TV industry's executive suites.
(More recently, Cowell has said he meant that he thought the show would eventually attain 20 million viewers.)
“The fact of the matter is that we have a very successful show, and we have an average of over 12 million viewers, so it’s a very successful show,” judge Antonio “L.A.” Reid — the former Island Def Jam Music Group chairman — told a gaggle of reporters Thursday during a conference call.
“Whether we hit 20 [million] or not . . . that’s a statement that Simon put out there, and I think it was an aspirational statement,” Reid said. “I hope that we can, at some point, get there.”
Fox feels the same way, too.
To compensate advertisers for the sluggish ratings, the network is now giving them extra commercial time on the show, the Wall Street Journal reports. WSJ and Fox are both owned by News Corp.
It’s not unusual for networks to compensate advertisers for ratings that aren’t meeting expectations; it’s just unusual for a network to compensate advertisers for ratings on a show starring Cowell.
Despite Cowell having bought into his own press — and having set up his show to look as if it’s faltering ratings-wise — “The X Factor” is not a flop. Thanks in large measure to the singing competition, Fox has gained more than a million viewers, compared with the early days of last season, and it’s the only broadcast network showing improvement in season-to-season comparisons — overall and among the 18- to-49-year-old viewers the network targets.
But it’s a pricey show — remember those reports about Fox having to beat NBC’s $250 million offer to Cowell to go produce and star in “The X Factor” for them? (When Cowell turned down NBC, it went and bought the format for another singing competition series, “The Voice,” and slapped it on the air before Cowell’s show was scheduled to debut. The rushed “Voice” averaged nearly 14 million viewers last spring.) In addition to having been over-promised by Cowell to consumers — and by Fox to advertisers — “The X Factor’s” ratings have been hurt by postseason baseball games, which have jostled its schedule.
Last week, a rain delay in an afternoon postseason ballgame bumped “The X Factor” from its scheduled time slot Wednesday. Then Wednesday’s “The X Factor” got bumped to Thursday, and Thursday’s show to Sunday — all with little time to let viewers know. Sunday’s episode attracted an average audience of just under 9 million people.
This week, instead of airing Wednesday and Thursday, as it has so far this season, only one “The X Factor” episode was scheduled — airing Tuesday — to accommodate the World Series.
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