Execs will often consider whether a show appeals to advertisers' coveted demographic: 18-to-34-year-olds. Wehrenberg cited Scrubs as an example of a show that has never earned big ratings but has been kept on the air due to its appeal to the younger, edgier, hipper crowd.
However, she noted it's become so difficult to attract 18-to-34-year-old audiences that scoring with their demographic is becoming less important. "It's getting less and less that [needing to succeed in that demographic] actually applies, because the audience is just so fractured—they're diverging to so many different places right now."
TV is losing its most coveted viewers to the Internet. In a recent IBM survey of more than 2,400 households in the United States, the U.K., Germany, Japan, and Australia, 19 percent of consumers said they spent six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage, yet only 9 percent reported spending the same amount of time watching TV. Sixty-six percent reported viewing one to four hours of TV per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage. "The Internet is becoming consumers' primary entertainment source," said Saul Berman, IBM media and entertainment strategy and change practice leader, in a statement. "The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18–34."
But perhaps TV can get a boost from the Web's popularity. According to a November 2006 Newsday article, The Office was "saved" after its dismal first season because the show was an immediate hit on iTunes, where it became the most downloaded program.
Angela Bromstad, then president of NBC Universal Television Studio, told Newsday, "I'm not sure that we'd still have the show on the air without the iTunes boost…. The network had only ordered so many episodes, but when it went on iTunes and really started taking off, that gave us another way to see the true potential other than just Nielsen. It just kind of happened at a great time."
This year, Conchords' free episodes also often ranked at the top of iTunes' charts, and the podcast maintained by the comedy duo on which the show is based is currently among the most downloaded. Wehrenberg noted The Office had already been picked up for a second season before it became an iTunes success. Still, The Office's significant online popularity helped the show build momentum. "It's not one of the main factors, but if someone's fighting for a show, you certainly could throw into the mix that it's doing really well on iTunes and there's a fan base for it."
David Denman, who plays Roy Anderson on The Office, said it's impossible to predict whether a pilot will become a hit. "I've done, like, eight pilots, and every time, everyone thinks it's going to go for 10 years. We were all very excited about [The Office], and we were proud of the work…. We all kind of felt like this is going to be a sleeper hit and that if you put it on Thursday nights in the Friends spot, we're going die right off the bat."
He said speculation over the show's cancellation continued after it had been picked up for a second season. Although star Steve Carell had a huge hit in the intervening summer with The 40-Year-Old Virgin and had won a Golden Globe for The Office, NBC chose to funnel its promotional dollars into My Name Is Earl, which preceded The Office on Thursday nights. That proved to be a good strategy, as more people stayed on NBC to watch The Office. A boost in its ratings helped the show stay on the air long enough to find a voice that distinguished it from the original British version, and eventually audiences caught on.
Denman has learned to take a wait-and-see attitude when he's cast in a pilot. "There's nothing you can do about that stuff. It doesn't behoove you as an actor to sit around and worry," said Denman, who recently completed the pilot Backyards & Bullets, executive-produced by Jamie Tarses (My Boys). "You always have that danger when you do a pilot of getting this gigantic chunk of change, and all of a sudden you're like, 'It's going to run forever, and I'm buying a house in the Hollywood Hills.' I've known numerous actors who got a pilot that they thought was going to run forever, and they went out and blew all of the money. Now they've got a mortgage they can't pay for.
"I always keep it in perspective," he added. "You hope it does really well because you're proud of it and you love the show, but you can't control whether or not people watch it…. The executives are going to make all of the choices, and you hope that they feel the same way about the show."