One side effect of NBC’s announcement last week that it would cancel Southland before season two even aired was a report from Michael Ausiello that the network might bring back Chuck before its planned March debut—maybe as soon as the end of this month.
You might think that Chuck fans would all react as Ausiello did—”How happy are we?”—but my Twitter feed has since been full of debate as to whether NBC is better off waiting. The argument (as advanced by, among others, TV critics Dan Fienberg and Alan Sepinwall) is that NBC has no good places to promote Chuck right now, and thus the show needs the promotional push from the Olympics.
I like Chuck, but I’m not as fervent a fan as some out there, so I don’t think I really have a dog in this fight. But to me, Chuck’s real problem is simple: it airs on NBC. And while a lot of people watch the Olympics, I don’t see much evidence that will affect Chuck one way or another.
The Olympics are a big platform, true, but they’re not especially targeted—they’re like aerial leafletting as opposed to direct mailing. OK, yeah—theoretically, the Olympics is a better platform for NBC to advertise something than its fall schedule. But in the end, we’re still talking NBC. There are probably better times in the year for Estonia to invade Russia, as well, I am sure.
Looking at the last decade historically, I can’t think of an example of NBC using its Olympics to successfully promote anything. Perhaps I’m remembering wrong, but let’s look back. 2000’s Sydney games were unusually late, interrupting the usual fall launch, but that was the fall that produced such NBC hits as Deadline, DAG, Titans and The Michael Richards Show. (It did give us Ed, which survived a few seasons.) One study found that as a whole, NBC’s shows promoted during the games did worse overall, if anything. The 2002 Winter Games led into the much-hyped midseason debut of Leap of Faith. 2004: The year of Joey. Midseason 2006—maybe there’s an NBC success I’m forgetting. And 2008, after a very successful Beijing Olympics, was the disaster season of My Own Worst Enemy, Knight Rider, Kath and Kim and Crusoe. I’m not sure NBC can survive much more Olympic success like this.
And there’s a flip side to waiting until March, as Maureen Ryan points out: the out-of-sight out-of-mind factor, which could cancel any promotional bump from the Olympics. [Update: I do think, though, that there’s something to Sepinwall’s argument that—the Olympics aside—it could hurt Chuck to rush it on air without any time for promotion.]
I’m not wishing ill on Chuck, God knows. But if NBC wants to give it the best promotional platform, all I can think of is that it advertise and/or air it on a different network. Beyond that, I’d be glad to wait for Chuck if I thought it would make a positive difference, but it might be better for Chuck fans to simply get their show aired while they can—and before NBC changes its mind again about something else.
But as I said, I’m an admirer of Chuck, not a rabid fan. What do the Chuck die-hards out there want to see?