‘Roseanne’ Ratings Are The Dead Cat Bounce of Nostalgia TV

The Roseanne revival has been a massive success by any measure — it premiered to a bigger audience than the Oscars, has been the most-watched show in America every week since its premiere, and has earned massive news-media and social-media attention for broadcaster ABC — but it’s also a focal point for a network and an industry having an identity crisis.

Last week’s episode of Roseanne featured former series regular and current The Big Bang Theory co-star Johnny Galecki, and it still lost 500,000 same-day viewers from the week before — from 13.8 million viewers down to 13.3 million — according to Nielsen ratings data. The 7-day viewing total, which is not yet available, will likely put the audience loss closer to 800,000 viewers from the previous week’s episode.

In the month since the debut of the Roseanne revival, the series has lost an estimated 7.9 million of the 27.3 million viewers who watched the premiere, and it will likely have lost more than one-third of its premiere audience by the time last week’s episode is completely counted. (TV ratings are measured in same-day, 3-day, 7-day and 30-day totals. The 7-day totals are the best data currently available for the Roseanne revival.)

Roseanne has been a ratings hit across all age demographics, but it hasn’t helped ABC’s Tuesday night lineup much beyond its own time slot. Last week, Roseanne led off the 8 p.m. hour with 13.3 million viewers, and the rest of the lineup was a downward spiral of four shows — comedies Alex, Inc. (4.9 million viewers), black-ish (4.0 million) and Splitting Up Together (3.6 million), and Shondaland drama For the People (2.0 million) — that could all conceivably be cancelled by May 15 when ABC announces its new fall schedule. ABC finished far behind CBS and NBC for the night. (ABC’s Tuesday comedy block this week was four Roseanne reruns from the current season.)

The Roseanne revival appears to be a dead-cat bounce — Wall Street-speak for a small reprieve in an otherwise downward trend — of nostalgia TV. (Billions named a Season 2 episode after the phenomenon.) Roseanne aside, ratings trends for revivals across the major broadcast networks has ranged from so-so to awful:

• ABC’s American Idol reboot, which premiered two weeks before Roseanne, is a moderate success but has still lost 20 percent of its premiere-night audience.
• FOX’s The X-Files revival in 2016 did well enough to merit another season, but that premiered in 2018 to terrible ratings. The 24 revival 24: Legacy in 2017 was a ratings disaster. (And only 12 episodes! It’s called 24!) Neither is likely to be back.
• The clearest example of a TV revival losing its way is NBC’s Will & Grace, which saw a huge wave of anticipatory media in the fall, premiered in September to an audience of 15.8 million viewers, bled viewers across a 16-episode season, and limped across the finish line earlier this month with only 6.5 million viewers for the season finale. If NBC had not renewed the show early in the season, it may well have cancelled it.

Vulture West Coast editor Josef Adalian, an experienced Nielsen ratings analyst, said Will & Grace‘s ratings decline has been a mashup of problems. “The premiere, and even the first few episodes, was always going to contain the type of casual viewer who just wanted to see what the hype was all about or how everyone looked after so many years away,” Adalian said. Will & Grace also disappeared for a month for the Winter Olympics, skipped a lot of weeks, and competed with premieres on Netflix and elsewhere. “Even when revived shows are well done,” Adalian added, “they’re never going to feel shiny and new.”

Still, steep declines are not the norm. Even as broadcast ratings are declining overall, most successful shows on the broadcast networks have had fairly stable ratings this season. Shows as varied as CBS’s The Big Bang Theory and Survivor, NBC’s This Is Us and The Voice, ABC’s The Good Doctor and The Bachelor and FOX’s Empire and The Orville have all been steadier performers than Roseanne or Will & Grace.

I’m sure both had premiere viewers who were only there for the event-ness of it all, but the failure of every revival to date except Roseanne — and there’s time enough for it to fail too — is a little perplexing. Those failures go beyond the general decline of broadcast ratings over the last several years; many shows across all four networks are performing well even in an environment where 3 million U.S. households cancelled traditional TV service last year.

“I think the real test for Roseanne will be next season, but I’d bet a good amount of money no one at ABC is sweating its week-to-week declines,” says veteran ratings watcher Rick Porter, who runs the TV By the Numbers website. “The business has changed so much in the past five years or so that safer swings are the norm. A bunch of shows with consistently middling numbers is probably better for the bottom line than a few big swings that endear you to TV Twitter but only last 13 episodes.”

The revivals represent something of a mid-life crisis for the big broadcasters. Their audiences are aging as younger households leave traditional TV or never join it in the first place, and the households subscribing to streaming bundles like DirecTV Now and Hulu Live TV are typically younger and more inclined to watch younger-skewing shows. According to Nielsen data, the average viewer of The Flash on The CW is 42 years old; the average Roseanne viewer is 53.

I can’t imagine that the Murphy Brown revival that CBS has ordered for fall will be more successful than any of the other revivals, and adding Tyne Daly — best known for CBS’s Cagney & Lacey, which went off the air in 1988 — doesn’t exactly signal a big push for millennial viewers. CBS has CBS All Access for bolder swings like Star Trek: Discovery and The Good Fight, ABC owner Disney will soon have its own SVOD service or two, and NBC owner Comcast has cable channels like Syfy and USA Network.

The majority of the pilots that the broadcast networks have in contention for fall, which Deadline’s Nelly Andreeva discusses here, are predictably broadcast network-y, including police procedurals, family comedies and and new takes on classics like Magnum, P.I. (with a Latino lead!) and Charmed. Predictability is fine — that’s what network TV is in 2018 — but revivals are likely near the point of diminishing returns.

Seinfeld, Friends or possibly Cheers would have the zeitgeist power to make a Roseanne-sized splash, but the lesson so far is that revivals just aren’t the shows they used to be.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a weekly podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.