Hulu Headaches: Modern Family Co-Creator Steve Levitan Discusses Flawed Ratings System's Improper Counting
Just two weeks after making statements at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour about his desire that ABC remove his show from Hulu and ABC.com, Modern Family's co-creator Steve Levitan again fired back at digital platforms earlier this week, following the announcement of a potential IPO for Hulu."Some estimate Hulu IPO could bring in $2Bil," wrote Levitan on Twitter. "What will the content providers get? Zero. What is Hulu without content? An empty jukebox."
Levitan's frustration is palpable, particularly when you consider that Hulu and other online platforms like the network's own ABC.com could be siphoning away viewers from the linear broadcast. While that's to be expected in an age of heavy DVR users, time-shifting, and an array of potential platforms from which to consume programming, it fails to address one major issue, said Levitan: these viewers aren't necessarily being counted when looking at the overall ratings for an individual program.
While I had spoken to Levitan last week for a piece about Modern Family's Emmy nominations for The Daily Beast, Levitan and I got to speaking about his comments at TCA Summer Press Tour regarding Hulu and about his fears that viewers are slipping through the cracks. What follows is a section from the transcript of our conversation.
Jace Lacob: You’ve been outspoken about your desire that Modern Family be removed from online sites like Hulu and ABC.com because it further fractures the ratings portrait for the show. Do you think the show would benefit by limiting its availability outside of the linear broadcast?
Steve Levitan: In a weird way, I don’t want to say that I regret those comments but I think that they deserve a finer point. I want as many people to watch our show as possible. All I am saying is that we want credit for that. That’s really it. We want there to be a ratings system that encompasses all viewing on all devices: on broadcast television, on your iPad, on Hulu, on iTunes, on your DVR, whatever it is, because more and more it just seems like there’s a feeling that network comedy is dying because, look, the numbers are down.
But one could argue that, yeah, the numbers are down somewhat because of the fractured nature of the audience but when you start adding up all the different ways that someone can see the show, maybe the story is much more impressive than it appears, across the board. In a lot of ways, this is not just a beef for this show, it’s a note in general, which is to say that we need transparency, we need to know that these shows are reaching— How many millions of people are being missed because they are not being properly counted? It’s not money in my pocket that I’m crowing about here, that somehow I’m get ripped off or whatever.
But when people say, wow, your show gets 10 million viewers each week--or whatever it ended up being--but, boy, ten years ago, 18 million people were watching, that sounds really depressing and you can understand why the networks and the studios are pounding down everyone’s salaries. But when you look at the bigger picture and count all the other ways that people can watch it, the story is better than it appears. The picture it brighter than it appears. So that’s really what my beef is. I am frustrated that I can’t ever get a straight answer as to how many people are watching our show.
Lacob: The system itself would seem to be inherently flawed, given the proliferation of ways that viewers can watch shows. That was the case with Starz and Party Down, where far too many people were watching via Netflix streaming rather than via the linear broadcast on the network.
Levitan: That’s a perfect example, where if you’re giving it away in such a manner that those eyeballs are not being counted, then it’s one tiny notch better than not having those eyeballs at all. That’s a confusing statement. I care about quality television and I know that producing a quality television show along the lines of Lost or Modern Family or you name it, in order to sustain a show like this, it takes enormous resources. One person can’t do this. It’s not throwing up a hilarious 45-second video on YouTube. You have to sustain this over time and that takes a giant investment by a studio. And the only way the studios are going to continue to make those kind of big investments is if they know there’s a payoff at the end and if we continue dilute that big payoff at the end then they’re continue to push down their initial investments. At the end of the day, the quality over a long period of time will begin to dissipate.
That is what concerns me. I don’t want it misunderstood: I value every single one of our fans. I really, really do. It kind of bothered me that I came off as not caring about those people who for some reason can’t watch it the traditional way. I do value those viewers. I just want them to be counted.
Lacob: You’re saying it doesn’t matter how people consume the show, just that they do consume it in some fashion and their viewership should be counted towards the overall figures for the show.
Levitan: Exactly. Look at the reporting practices. Everyone tunes in, that next morning, the numbers are tallied and printed that same day. That’s the big number, that’s the number that people care about and then it’s pretty much forgotten. So all the numbers that drift in over the next week--digital and DVR numbers and all that--that’s a twelfth page story.
Lacob: The overnights are sort of a fait accompli right now.
Levitan: Which is silly when you think about the way that our show is being consumed.
Season Two of Modern Family launches this fall on ABC.
