When the 32-year-old TV newsmagazine moved into podcasting, a few key assets helped it catapult beyond the tough competition.
NBC News announced Thursday that Dateline senior producer Paul Ryan will be the show’s new executive producer. He will oversee the brand’s broadcast, streaming and podcast entities.
Once again, the popular newsmagazine show is top of its class, also coming in as No. 1 among true crime franchises, for the 2023 broadcast year-to-date. According to Nielsen’s most current data, the series has amassed more than 125 million viewers this year across broadcast, licensing and syndication. Nielsen’s most current data includes viewership tallies from Dec. 26, 2022, to Dec. 14, 2023. Across TV and digital platforms, viewers have consumed 162.5 billion minutes of Dateline, NBCU says.
David Corvo, considered the driving force behind Dateline, NBC’s top-rated and longest-running primetime series, is stepping down as senior executive producer at the end of the year. He will remain with NBC News as an adviser on various projects, reporting to Rebecca Blumenstein, president of editorial at NBC News.
Averaging 1.6 million daily viewers, Dateline in syndication has grown its audience by 21% year-over-year and ranks as a top five one-hour Monday-Friday show in syndication.
The true crime storytelling that has done so well for so long on television seems to have met a moment in an entirely new medium.
Exclusives
On Monday, NBC is launching Dateline Premium, a new subscription on Apple Podcasts offering ad-free access to more than 400 hours of exclusive audio programming. The subscription costs $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year, after a seven-day free trial.
“You can’t just put your show on broadcast and hope the show’s going to do a big number,” says David Corvo, senior executive producer of Dateline. “You have to accumulate that number over a number of different platforms.” Soon, one of those will be Peacock, where the show’s producers expect to launch a new Dateline format, one that isn’t tied to the rhythms of broadcast TV and will have an almost documentary style to it.
While it began life as just another broadcast newsmagazine, the show has taken on a life of its own in recent years, leaning into the true crime genre, and riding that wave as it picked up steam across streaming and podcasts. For the newsmagazine’s 30th season, the network is planning a special podcast and a marathon on Peacock.
ABC News’ 20/20, anchored by David Muir and Amy Robach, won the broadcast season for the first time in five years, according to Nielsen Media Research ratings data. In total viewership since the season began on Sept. 21, 2020, 20/20 had a 3% lead on Dateline, but the lead was greater in the advertiser-coveted age demographics. In the 18-49 demo, the 9 p.m. ET show was up by 25% while in the 25-54 range, its lead was 17%.
The NBC newsmagazine does many of the things that other popular true-crime series do. But its success has as much to do with its old-fashioned style.
NBC will explore The InBetween starting later this spring, it was announced on Monday. Premiering Wednesday, May 29, at 10 p.m., The InBetween stars Harriet Dyer (No Activity) as Cassie Bedford, a young woman who has visions. NBC also set the following summertime premiere dates: Dateline, June 10 at 10 p.m.; The Wall, June 20 at 8; and Hollywood Game Night, July 11 at 9.
The syndicated version of Dateline is currently in its second season airing on Fox Television Stations as well as leading station groups across the country and has been renewed for season three on Sinclair, Hearst, Tribune, Nexstar, Graham Media, Gray, Cox Media Group, Tegna, Scripps, Sunbeam, Weigel, Block, Hubbard and more.
The syndicated version of Dateline has improved both primetime and early fringe time periods by 10% for stations in November 2017 compared to a year ago.
The award-winning true crime series has been sold in more than 80% of the U.S. Double runs of Dateline will also be offered to stations to air as a two-hour true crime block.
Wills and Kate apparently trump chills and monster-bait. NBC on Monday preempted the regularly scheduled episode of Siberia for A Little Prince, a Dateline special about the newest member of England’s royal family.
Now in it’s 20th season, the NBC News show is launching “Dateline Chatline,” a major social TV initiative aimed at merging “all viewer discussion surrounding Dateline into one easy-to-access, user-friendly online site.”
For several months, Dateline personnel have studied the behavior and postings of the show’s fans on Facebook and other social media milieu, allowing them to create an ad campaign that speaks to the way viewers interact with the program, not its smiling personalities or lurid headlines.
Cable and broadcast network audiences can’t seem to get enough of true crime all the time. For programmers, crime pays like no other genre; they are offering more homicides than ever — real murders, not those conjured by Hollywood scriptwriters. The documentary accounts of husbands slaying wives, strangers killing for sex or money, and people on drugs committing murder for more drugs have become a staple of weekly network television through series like 48 Hours Mysteries on CBS on Saturday nights and Dateline on NBC on Friday nights.
