Ok, let me do this one person at a time.

Morjana,

You are all too welcome, just giving credit where credit is due. TV Guide is a site that is on my low priority list of feeds so I probably wouldn't have seen this right away. This is why I love Twitter.

You do far more for these shows than I do, so if anything, the thanks belong to you.

There are definitely a lot of reasons that shows get canceled. Ratings, network and studio funding problems, network/studio interference, a change in network or studio management, show politics, rights/legal issues, or just a general lack of patience. Fox, I always point out, canceled Anchor Woman this year after just one episode had aired.

And Flash Gordon is actually an interesting parallel with The Sarah Connor Chronicles. SCC began its life with 18 million viewers after an NFL playoff game, but only got 10 million viewers about 24 hours later in its regular Monday night time slot. Then it was 8.65, 8.84, 8.32, 8.1, 7.12, 7.75, and finally 8.29 for the season finale. Season 2 went like this until I stopped tracking it: 6.34, 5.49, 5.81. I looked at it back on the 10th and it appears to be holding in the low five million range.

Both shows lost a sizable chunk of their audience over the first few episodes, which is not good news for any series. At a certain point you've got to wonder what the cutoff is, at what point will the ratings not bring in enough revenue to justify the cost of production. Well, as we saw with the fourth season of Enterprise which supposedly cut its cost nearly in half -- if you've got the room to move in the first place -- a show with falling ratings can do some things to survive.

And you've absolutely made a great point about the difference between cable and broadcast network television, although those differences are becoming less so with the ascendence of cable. Rarely will any cable show not get a full season order because they expect a smaller audience and work on smaller budgets from the get-go. While it's true that Sanctuary uses CGI sets a lot, I think people tend to underestimate what CGI actually costs. It's definitely cheaper than extensive shooting on location, but cheaper is a relative term -- it doesn't mean cheap period.

I'm very concerned about Sanctuary still, if not just because we don't know where it will settle or if it will settle at all. If it keeps bleeding viewers, it won't last, that's just a sad fact that every show has to deal with. If it finds a comfortable bottom, say 1.2 in the household rating, it'll probably be fine. If it dips below 1, it's going to get canceled.

Obviously I'm not a fan of the show, but you know about me and what my passions are, I don't wish for any show to go off the air unless it's actually bad, versus not my cup of tea.

SCC is just bad, Sanctuary is just not my cup of tea.

Thanks for stopping by to comment, as always.

TraceC,

If you were familiar with this site, you'd know that while I have been a fan of the Stargate franchise for as long as I've been aware of it, I'm anything but a fan boy.

I'm also not sure of where I've "made a mistake" since the ratings issue has yet to be cleared up. As soon as I hear back from Scifi, I'll update this post and the other and everything will be cleared up one way or another.

No you couldn't possibly just congratulate them and leave it at that could you?

No, this is not a fan site, it's running commentary and analysis on the television and film industry. A series that just got renewed deserves congratulations for that achievement, but it would be irresponsible to ignore its ratings problem.

You have to go and intimate that they got renewed for various nefarious reasons!

The industry consensus is that shows with ratings problems, ones we all know would be on the bubble or canceled already, are getting a longer look because of global economic instability. It is speculation for sure, but warranted nonetheless. If I didn't chip in with my own thoughts along those lines, I wouldn't be fulfilling the mandate of this blog. If you disagree with me, well, that's what the comments are for. I welcome dissent and debate but I'm not sure I see the value in chiding me for doing the very thing that I created this blog for.

Of the reasons I listed, I wouldn't consider any of them nefarious.

If you look around the net you'll find interviews where it's said that SciFi is very pleased with Sanctuary's performance; maybe Sanctuary exceeding their expectations has more to do with their renewal than your warped fanboy suppositions.

I've been around long enough to know that statements like that don't amount to much. Scifi was supposedly happy with Stargate Atlantis' ratings last season, which are roughly equal to or even a little bit lower than this season -- yet higher than what came before -- and they canceled it anyway. I'm far less interested in what a network says than the history of what it has actually done. That's the nature of the business, from a series to an individual actor or writer -- thrilled today, love you a ton, I'll make you famous, gone tomorrow.

The Live +SD ratings (Coverage)* for Sanctuary are 2.2, 1.6, 1.6 & 1.4 - hmmm do you see them bleeding viewers every single week?

Not every single week, but three out of four is pretty bad. 2.2 to 1.4 is a 37% drop. That's what matters here, the trend, not the number. If it dropped 3/4 weeks, it's probably going to drop 6/8. The real question is where it will level off, and will that final number be acceptable to Scifi. At 1.4 or 1.2 the answer is probably yes. Below 1.2, I doubt it'll get a third season.

..so I guess it still has a long way to go before struggling it's way off the top 10 SF&F shows on SciFi Channel

Just so we're clear, that doesn't really mean anything. Shows are not sorted on a network by genre when deciding on what to keep and what to cancel. Primarily it's going to be these three factors:

1. What does it cost now, and what will it cost later?
A show that's been on the air for more than a couple of years gets more expensive every single year beyond that, because everyone demands and expects to receive raises for contributing to a successful show, and generally speaking they either get what they want, or they walk. This is why Rob Lowe left The West Wing.

Despite being a big name, he started the series at something like $70,000 per episode while many of the supporting cast started around $20,000. After the first three seasons and a ton of Emmys and great ratings, the cast demanded a bump which they all had earned and deserved. The supporters were bumped to Lowe's level of $70,000 per ep, but Lowe himself was left at that level.

While the show argued that they were merely bringing everyone up to where they ought to be, and that the supporting cast including Lowe were being paid appropriately at 70, Lowe saw it as everyone else getting a raise but him.

In television you simply do not do that and expect to keep your actors. Lowe walked and rightly so, because it set a bad precedent for his career.

I'd have walked as well, even from a show I was enthralled with.

I don't know off the top of my head what Sanctuary costs today, but being as young as it is, it has this point going in its favor for the time being. For SGA, FYI, this was probably a top 2 factor.

2. What is the rating trend and where is it in the demo?
A show with lower than expected ratings can survive a good long time if it performs strongly in the demo. A good example of that is Heroes. Heroes places third in its time slot but between 2nd and 3rd for the night in the 25-54 demo (last I looked which was at the beginning of the season), which makes it more attractive to advertisers and worth more money to the network than a show with a larger overall audience, but fewer people in the demo.

Demo breakdowns are part of what I've requested from Scifi and we'll see how it compares when I get that information.

If a series is trending down week-to-week, that will be considered.

3. Network and time slot ranking
Where does the program rank on the network, and where does it rank against competition across all of cable for that time slot? The worse the number is for each of those two metrics, the worse for the show. This is particularly important for a show that is trending downward like Sanctuary is.

While it may be doing slightly better than SGA today, SGA has held between 1.2 and 1.5 all year. Battlestar Galactica will do better than that, and Eureka the last time I saw the numbers was above 2. Ghost Hunters is 1.5-1.8 steady, and I wouldn't be surprised if pro-wrestling (ugh) does better than a 1.4. It doesn't matter if Sanctuary is the #2 genre show on the network right this second, if it keeps dropping, it won't maintain that ranking by next month much less the rest of the season, and it definitely won't keep it when Eureka and BSG return.

And that's not even talking about the new genre series that are coming in the form of Stargate Universe and Warehouse 13.

If Sanctuary dips below SGA and ends up below SGU and some of these other shows, it won't bode well for its future no matter how good the show is. That has nothing to do with me or my personal opinion, that's just the reality of television.

I appreciate your support for the show and hope for your sake that it stops losing viewers like this, but this is what I do, I write about this stuff. I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you or anyone else just because it's a show that you happen to enjoy. I went through this on the other side of the fence with Firefly but ultimately, ratings rule.