The Disappearing TV Audience

By Richard Zoglin

First it was, Who Killed Laura Palmer? Now the big question is, Who Shot Agent Dale Cooper? But with Twin Peaks adjourned for the summer, the networks are pondering another, even deeper mystery. For help, they have called in Agent Cooper himself. We pick him up as he drives into a new town, dictating into his omnipresent tape recorder:

Diane, it's 10:05 a.m., and I've just arrived in New York City. What a place! Just smell those skyscrapers. Had breakfast at a little deli on Ninth Avenue. Cheese Danish and a cup of coffee, black as a moonless night. Hit the spot. Now I'm looking for a place to stay -- clean place, reasonably priced. Can't find one.

Something strange is lurking beneath the seemingly normal surface of this big-city life. Oh, there's the usual flurry of activity at the end of the TV season: fall schedules being announced, old shows getting canceled, new ones being trumpeted. But there are secrets here, dark secrets.

It's the ratings, Diane. No, not just ABC vs. CBS vs. NBC. Since January there has been a dramatic and inexplicable falloff in all TV viewing. Overall, almost 4% of the audience seems to have vanished overnight. The drop is even greater for network viewing and for the demographic group that advertisers value most: adults between 18 and 49. Worse, the news comes just when the networks are getting ready to sell commercial spots for the fall season.

The investigation started before I got here. The networks are blaming the dropoff on flaws in the way Nielsen measures the audience. They point to a discrepancy between the national figures and separate local ratings that Nielsen took in February.

Here's where it gets interesting, Diane. Nielsen used to depend on diaries and household meters to measure national viewership. But in September 1987 the company switched to people meters. These devices, currently in 4,000 homes, require every member of the household to push a button whenever he or she starts watching TV. Ad executives love people meters because they can tabulate exactly who is watching TV at any given time. But the networks don't trust the gadgets, mainly because they show fewer people are watching network TV than the old system did.

Network researchers suggest that viewers are just getting tired of pushing those buttons. Crazier things have happened. In 1975 Nielsen showed another alarming drop in viewership. Turned out the problem was the glue attaching the meters to the TV set. As the sets heated up, the glue cracked and the meters disconnected.

Nielsen is standing firm. We've checked out the people meters, they say, and found no methodological problems. "We've been at this long enough to be able to reach the conclusion that the audience decline is a real one," says a top Nielsen executive, William Jacobi. Still, the company is continuing to study the mystery and will issue a new report in the next week or so.

The networks aren't happy. If the missing viewers can't be found, they stand to lose hundreds of millions in ad revenue. Alan Wurtzel, ABC's research chief, says, "Just at the time we need more precision, we have a methodology that seems to be providing more volatility."

Looks like I've got my work cut out for me, Diane. There are network executives to question. A suspicious one-armed man has been hanging around the Nielsen offices. Get Albert and his team on the case. Now if I can just get out of this bulletproof vest . . .

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source:NBC research derived from Nielsen Media Research data}]CAPTION: NETWORK NIGHTMARE

With reporting by William Tynan/New York