Agents of SHIELD low figures?

CBM news has an article saying Agents of Shield pulled in some very poor viewing figures this week and that cancellation might be coming. They then pulled the article! This screen grab shows the entry, but the article is not found when clicked on.

The Red Skull wins again!

Ya, too many people stopped watching season 1 and are not coming back to it when it finally gets good. I think its doomed. Agent Carter might be as well because I'm not sure that can attract viewers when AoS can't.

They thought a slow buildup in the first season would work well, but they were wrong. They didn't include enough superbeing guest shots to please a lot of the comics fans, and it isn't good enough to attract people who are into government agent / spy shows. Most people who are interested in the Marvel Universe are primarily interested in superpowered characters.

I was very happy to see The Absorbing Man, but I agree with Crothian - it might be too little, too late. I almost stopped watching partway through the first season, but stuck with it to see if it would improve. We'll have to see how this season goes. I'm not sitting through an entire season if it doesn't improve dramatically.

I don't think they needed superheroes or anything else the first season: They just needed to not have eight or nine episodes that were little more than filler. I am the exact demographic for this show, and I had a really hard time watching it after the first few episodes.

This is, frankly, a Joss Whedon problem. He writes strong pilots, strong finales and good tent pole moments around sweeps, and then hands over the other episodes to his team, some of whom do great (think of Buffy's "Hush") but who mostly turn in second-tier work (at best).

Dollhouse was a great example of this: other than the finale, the first season was almost entirely terrible, other than the Patton Oswalt episode. Yes, the network wanted it to be Creepy Sexy Time for the first few episodes, but even the long awaited "episodes that Joss really was excited about" turned out to be ... meh.

The only show I think he's ever done that was zero percent filler was Firefly, which looks more and more like an anomaly as the years go by. Instead of getting stuck with 22-episode seasons, which are obviously more than he has interest or perhaps ideas for, he'd be better off with BBC-sized six or seven-episode seasons that he could back with all A-quality stuff.

The fans weren't wrong about SHIELD, no matter how the actors snarked about it last season: The writing was really, really flabby and, coming off of a number of really tight Marvel movies, that was disastrous.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

The only show I think he's ever done that was zero percent filler was Firefly, which looks more and more like an anomaly as the years go by. Instead of getting stuck with 22-episode seasons, which are obviously more than he has interest or perhaps ideas for, he'd be better off with BBC-sized six or seven-episode seasons that he could back with all A-quality stuff.

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If I may - my opinion springs off this, but is slightly different.

It isn't that Firefly didn't have any "filler". In terms of plot structure, Firefly has several 'filler" episodes. But, what is normally "filler" in Firefly was filled with *character*. You could watch the people on Firefly perform the phone book, and it'd be dynamic and entertaining.

Other than Carlson, the characters on Agents of SHIELD were not very compelling. I, at least, found them boring. They didn't grip me even in non-filler episodes, I didn't care about them, so I gave up pretty quickly. I don't know if it is a failure in writing, in acting, or in cast chemistry.

But, I think the article was taken down because after adjustments it was shown that Agents of SHIELD actually did okay - 8.9 million viewers (a 3.2 share) in the live+3 days, up to meet the NCIS show it was competing against in the time slot. Basically, lots of people time-shifted their SHIELD.

Yeah, since 2009 ratings have been adjusted based on time-shifting caused by DVRs; traditional 'broadcast' TV numbers can show a significant jump within 7 days after the initial show.

I was surprised that AoS was renewed, but I think that the change in focus and promise of many more super-humans will keep the show afloat.
Skye wasn't as completely boring and annoying as she was before, but poor Fitz. I hope they can do something for him, because the Fitz-Simmons team was the main reason to watch, for me, other than Coulson.
I just hope they keep Grant as a HYDRA loyalist. I don't want to see him wander back and forth between Bad and Maybe-Bad; this is a significant part of what killed Sylar as a character.

What does "a 3.2 share" mean? That terminology is used a lot by US websites, but I've never understood what it means. Is it a percentage? Out of 10? Total number of viewers?

Morrus said:

What does "a 3.2 share" mean?

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From Wikipedia on Nielsen Ratings

The most commonly cited Nielsen results are reported in two measurements: ratings points and share, usually reported as: "ratings points/share". As of 2013, there were an estimated 115.6 million television households in the United States, up 1.2% from the previous year due to the inclusion of televisions that receive content over the Internet. A single national ratings point represents one percent of the total number, or 1,156,000 households for the 2013–14 season. Nielsen re-estimates the number of TV-equipped households each August for the upcoming television season.

Share is the percentage of television sets in use tuned to the program. For example, Nielsen may report a show as receiving a 9.2/15 during its broadcast, meaning that on average 9.2 percent of all television-equipped households watching TV were tuned in to that program at any given moment, while 15 percent were tuned into that program during this time slot. The difference between rating and share is that a rating reflects the percentage of the total population of televisions tuned to a particular program while share reflects the percentage of televisions actually in use.

So there's "percentage of all possible TVs" (rating) and "percentage of those TVs that were watching something at the time" (share).

You'll note that they also often break it down by demographic - a 3.2 share *within the 18-49 age bracket* for example.

Well, from that quote I gather it's a 3.2% audience share of viewers watching TV at the time? It's not exactly a Wikipedia article written by expert communicators!