30 Rock Bombs in The Ratings
By Krystal Clark
Here in America, critics and audiences are under the spell of Tina Fey‘s comedy 30 Rock, but over in Germany they could care less. According to THR, the U.S. series finally made its debut on German television and it bombed…bad! It’s never an easy feat to make the German people laugh, but they either hated the show or forgot it was on because the ratings were atrocious.
30 Rock debuted in Germany on Sunday via broadcaster ZDFNeo and received a ratings score of 0.0. That means less than 5,000 people tuned in to watch the antics of Tina, Alec Baldwin, and Tracy Morgan. The debut was below even the lowest forecast standards for the station, which took on the promising stateside series. ZDF, made 30 Rock the flagship in its new relaunch, which promised more cutting-edge programming for a younger demographic. Unfortunately, the target audience wasn’t interested in what they were selling.
Not to completely throw 30 Rock under the bus, other programs that debuted that night also performed poorly. The BBC comedy Taking the Flak didn’t bring in the viewers, and neither did the feature presentation of the 2006 Michael Douglas thriller, The Sentinel.
The German network used to be known as ZDFDoku, and served a niche market of documentary film fanatics, in which the channel averaged a 0.3% market share. With this rebirth, ZDFNeo has a lot of struggling to do before it becomes a contender with other major broadcasting networks. Their goal is to reach a 0.6% share by the end of next year.
This may have been a rough first outing, but there are plenty of networks that struggle in the early years of development. It’s hard to find an audience when people aren’t familiar with your brand yet.
What do you think of the low ratings for 30 rock overseas?
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 6:23AM
"It’s never an easy feat to make the German people laugh" – really? Funny, that – I've seen tons of laughing people when I stayed in Germany, and they show tons of comedies on TV, with some German stand-up comedians performing in front of 50'000 people. American humor =/= universal humor loved by every person on this planet. But if they "could care less", there's still hope.
How about facts rather than stereotypes? ZDF neo is new, a digital channel (and therefore not available in every household) and most people don't have a clue it even exists, as barely any promotion for the relaunch was done. 30 Rock is full of references to American popculture. Even Americans don't catch every joke. Add to that the dubbing – it's almost impossible to make this series work in German. The target audience has already seen the original version and it was predictable they wouldn't tune in to watch their beloved show robbed of its humor and the jokes they know.
And maybe, just maybe, 30 Rocks isn't as funny as it's hyped to be in the first place.