What post-Super Bowl bounce?

There are a lot of traditions concerning the Super Bowl; the two weeks of unrelenting hype, the 10-hour pre-Super Bowl pregame show analyzing every possible match up, the dramatic coin toss that for some reason does NOT determine the winner.  One of the oddest is the idea by the network hosting the Super Bowl to use the humungous audience tuned into a football game to either launch a new series or bolster and existing one.  I don’t think it is a good idea, but it keeps happening.

This year, Super Bowl LI (I keep thinking it’s an homage to Jet Li) is nothing more than a diversion from the real TV experience—the debut of 24: Legacy, a reboot of the successful TV show starring Kiefer Sutherland that has been off the air for at least a couple of years.  This is where creativity in Hollywood lies, rebooting stuff that hasn’t been gone long enough for anyone to miss it.

Anyway, Fox thinks that the best way to have 24: Legacy hit the ground running is to schedule its first episode immediately after a program that will have an audience in the hundreds of millions.  Everyone will be to weary and overfed to pick up the remote and change the channel, so they’ll have no choice but to watch 24: Legacy and be enthralled.  What could go wrong?

First of all, no one is ever quite sure when the Super Bowl will end, so those odd people who may want to watch the show but not the Super Bowl will have no idea when to turn in, or even set their DVR players.  Okay this year the Super Bowl went into overtime (and why hasn’t that happened before?), but disregarding that the game often comes down to 4^th quarter possessions that require lots of time outs, lots of clock-stoppages, and lots of strategy that all takes time.  Plus, the Super Bowl half time show always requires an indeterminate amount of time to set up and take down the stage.  So the game may supposed to end at 7, but the final whistle won’t be for long after that.

Then there is the endless pomp of the awards ceremony, followed by endless analysis of what the key plays were, who is the MVP (sometimes it isn’t the QB of the winning team!) and so on.  So good luck knowing when the game will end.

Except that we do know it will end around 11 PM Eastern Time.  Since 2000 no Super Bowl lead-out has begun before 10:15 PM Eastern Time, and 5 times they have begun at 10:45 or later.  So, no one on the East Coast (who has to go to work or school the next day) can stay up and watch the show.  And this this ties back to what I said about the difficulty of DVRing the show with an indeterminate start time and end time.

The post-Super Bowl time slot does tend to pull a greater than a 20 share in the ratings, but again look at the time slot on the East Coast and ask, what is the competition?  Do new shows get a ratings bump and go on to be successful?  Ask the producers of MacGruder & Loud, which followed Super Bowl XIX in 1985, or The Last Precinct which followed the Super Bowl in 1986, or Grand Slam which followed the Super Bowl in 1990.  Other shows debuting after the Super Bowl include such long running classics as The Good Life and The John Larroquette Show (a good show actually, but it wasn’t around for long).

Recent shows have had better runs after their debuts, but that’s because the networks finally caught on that running an episode of an existing show was less of a gamble.  Frankly the only post-Super Bowl episode I recall is the one for Alias in 2003 which began with a Sydney Bristow lingerie show that was leaked to the media before it was shown on TV.  I don’t think men that had just watched the Super Bowl stayed tuned for the excellent plotting and well-crafted dialog.

We’ll see how successful 24: Legacy turns out, but if it succeeds it won’t be because Super Bowl fans were too numb to change the channel with the remote after watching Tom Brady exact his vengeance on Roger Goodell.