Failing The Tests
Test Audiences Have Slammed Some Of TV’s Most Successful Shows
Blog by Star!Expert, Friday, May 12, 2006
What will you be watching on TV over the next few years?
Chances are even the most-high powered network executive doesn’t have a clue.
The programs you view every night have been tested rigorously in front of average TV audiences to gauge their responses well before they ever hit air.
And what they say has an awful lot to do with what you see.
It involves watching something called a ‘pilot’, an initial version of a TV show that’s filmed before a series gets the expensive O.K.
There’s just one problem. These “average” viewers are so often out to lunch you might think they’d left and gone to a diner.
Here’s a list of just some of the shows they’ve hated over the years, programs that if research had been believed, you never would have had the chance to see.
When two teenaged girls savaged a show at one test, the rest of the audience felt intimidated and refused to contradict them.
Luckily, the executive behind the program had already received a commitment to air it.
Its name? “7th Heaven”, one of the most successful family shows of the last decade.
Then there’s a series that test viewers called ‘too honest and too painful.’
"Our head of ad sales said we will not put this on the air, but we fought like hell for it,” remembers former executive Ted Harbert. That show? “thirtysomething.”
Producer Glenn Gordon Caron has a similar horror story.
He wanted a young unknown actor cast in the lead role of his new series, but when they showed the test of his work to 300 people, nobody liked him.
Caron went with his gut and that’s how Bruce Willis wound up with his breakthrough role on “Moonlighting”.
"I'm dubious of testing," he says now. "I don't think it's revelatory of anything other than how it does in the context in which you play it."
Other shows that got the thumb’s down from less than discerning test audiences: “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Roseanne” and “Friends”, which its own network called “not very entertaining, clever, or original.”
But in the annals of TV pilots, there’s one all time champ that takes the crown as what may be the worst testing show in history.
It was a program so few people liked, network executives almost didn’t green light another episode.
In fact, if someone in the upper echelons hadn’t believed in the show and decided to give it a few more shots, you would never have heard of it.
The name of perhaps the most hated program in audience testing history?
“Seinfeld”.
Which may prove that tests you don’t have to study for simply aren’t worth taking.
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