Debmar-Mercury exec Mort Marcus (c) says Wendy Williams (l) has it, but Meredith Vieira doesn’t. Marcus and Debmar-Mercury Co-President Ira Bernstein also offered opinions on the outlook for broadcast TV, the impact of station group consolidation on syndication and more.
Marcus: POV Crucial To Talk Show Success
Meredith Vieira’s daytime talk show isn’t succeeding because she lacks a unique “voice” or “point of view,” says Mort Marcus, co-president of Debmar-Mercury, syndicator of The Wendy Williams Show.
Marcus brought up Vieira to make a point about Williams and why her show is working and Vieira’s show, distributed by NBCUniversal Television Distribution, appears unable to lift itself out of the ratings doldrums so far in its second season.
“Not taking a shot at Meredith Vieira, who’s a great broadcaster, [but] she doesn’t have a point of view,” Marcus said Wednesday in a joint interview with Debmar-Mercury’s other co-president, Ira Bernstein. The two were interviewed by Williams herself before an audience at this week’s TV “Content Show” in New York, presented by Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News.
“[Vieira is] just kind of a nice, good broadcaster,” Marcus said. “Wendy has a point of view. You need a voice … Dr. Phil [for example]. You can tell the ones that work. They just have a strong point of view. … We see so many and most people can’t do it.”
So far this season, Vieira has been scoring a consistent 0.9 rating in the weekly Nielsen numbers for syndicated shows. In the most recent report, Williams had a 1.5 rating, and is syndicated television’s sixth-ranked talk show.
The Debmar-Mercury co-presidents also commented on:
The outlook for broadcast television: Marcus said he believes that “skinny bundling” will emerge as advantageous to broadcasters because local TV stations will remain a part of cable system bundles, while many cable networks will be left out. “As the skinny bundling or cord-cutting continues, the people that are really getting hurt are the cable networks, but the broadcasters continue to be in every single home. So we believe that as you go out four and five years, the discrepancy between a cable network’s clearance and a broadcast [network’s] clearance will be huge. The cable networks might be in the 70 percent clearance [range] whereas the broadcast business will be in the 99 percent range, and then the pendulum of the advertising business will swing back to broadcasting. It’s a theory; that’s what we believe.”
The impact of station-group consolidation on the syndication business: “In some ways, it makes it easier [and] in some ways it makes it more difficult,” Bernstein said. “It’s easier in the sense that [all the stations in a group are] all marching to the same tune. … For example, when we launched [“Celebrity Name Game”] two years ago, it literally was launched in two groups – Tribune and Sinclair – and we had basically 75 percent of the country done in two deals. The bad news is you live and die by two people.”
The progress of their newest talk show project, T.D. Jakes, slated to premiere in September 2016 (if all goes well): “We tested it and the test worked as he grew quite a bit from the first week to the fourth week, and that’s why we’re taking it out [into the marketplace],” Bernstein told TVNewsCheck after the on-stage interview, referring to a four-week test of Jakes conducted this past summer on Tegna stations in Dallas, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Cleveland. “We think he has a unique voice,” Bernstein said of Jakes, who is a minister based in Dallas. “We are talking to a couple of people,” he said, when asked if the T.D. Jakes sales process is under way.
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