Comedy makes us laugh

As noted in the faux tweets a while back, TeenNick has started a post-midnight block of 1990s shows. This set off some comments on the GSN schedule board about the initially good ratings for the block compared to GSN's numbers. Some of my doodlings on the topic...

Other poster: I'm not sure about the nostalgia part. But it's "Teen" Nick. In a literal sense, their audience is 13-19. And they somehow find more eyeballs late at night than GSN can, whose age demographics aren't quite as defined. I find that quite ridiculous.

I agree that nostalgia is playing very little part here. The ratings Douglas posted show that most of TeenNick's audience after midnight (and probably before midnight, too) is teens 12-17. After all, the teens 12-17 rating is often four or five times as high as the adults 18-49 number. Many of those teens weren't even born when these shows originally ran, so they can hardly be all that nostalgic about them. Nostalgia is not noted as common in teenagers, anyway.

By the way, the novelty looks to be quickly wearing off. For the latest published day (Wednesday 7/27) the average viewership for the '90s block was down to 332K, compared to 490K on the first day, Monday 7/25. The teen audience is notoriously fickle and already seems to be moving on. It will be interesting to see what happens if Douglas keeps publishing the numbers.

And I still think that comedy, in general, has much wider appeal than game shows. That's why there are a lot more comedy shows on a lot more networks than game shows. So it doesn't stun me that comedy gets better ratings. TBS and Comedy Central have been getting better numbers than GSN for a long, long time...despite the fact that comedy networks have a lot more competition in their genre than GSN has in its.