Yellowstone’s 8MM Viewers Never Got The Memo That Cable Was Dead

Those of us old enough to remember the 90s likely remember a show called Home Improvement on ABC starring comedian Tim Allen. 

It was a highly rated series that ran for eight seasons on ABC but it rarely got any of the buzz that NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup of Friends, Seinfeld and Mad About You got during that era.

You see it was widely believed that Home Improvement’s primary appeal was to people who lived in what would soon become known as “the Red States”, people whose incomes and levels of sophistication were nowhere near as high as people who knew what a close talker was.

I am reminded of that scenario as news came out this week that the Season 4 premier of Yellowstone, a cable television series starring Kevin Costner, garnered a record breaking 8 million live-same day (L+SD) viewers, up 10.4% from its S3 debut. 

Even more surprising: the series runs on the little known Paramount network, not FX or AMC.

By comparison, Season 4 of Game of Thrones only drew 6.6 million L+SD viewers for its debut.

But it’s not Game of Thrones I want to compare Yellowstone to.

Rather, it’s Succession, HBO’s dark comedy/soap opera about the lives of a Murdoch/Trump-like dynasty.

The chattering classes cannot, it seems, chatter enough about Succession. No matter where you click, there they are. You’d sort of have to be living under a rock not to know what a Cousin Greg was, and it’s telling that the actors who portray the aforementioned Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) and snarky son Roman (Kieran Culkin) have both appeared on Saturday Night Live this season. And it’s only the first week of November.

And yet only 1.2 million people tuned into the Season 3 premier of Succession. 

So what do we take away here?

First off, there’s something I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to beat into people’s heads for the past several years now: Yes, you personally do not know anyone who still has a pay TV subscription.

We get it. 

But that doesn’t mean no one else does. 

Or that there aren’t tens of millions of people who are still perfectly satisfied with their current cable subscription and have no real desire to cut the cord or subscribe to more than one or two streaming services-—likely the ones they can get via their MVPD set top box—people who enjoy the sensation of clicking through the channel guide and who, though they may be over 55, are still going to be alive and clicking ten or 15 years from now.

These are the same people who are not all that enamored by quirky series featuring dark, conflicted antiheroes, preferring, instead, shows where good and evil are far less ambiguous.

Hence the appeal of Yellowstone, with its sprawling plotline vaguely reminiscent of the popular family dramas of the 80s, and the star power of 66-year-old Kevin Costner, an actor whose lack of any appreciable scandals or desire to shit-talk Johnny Depp has kept him out of the chattering class spotlight as of late.

It’s worth noting too, that at a macro level, both Succession and Yellowstone are about the same thing: successful businesses owned by larger-than-life patriarchs and said patriarchs’ complicated relationships with their complicated offspring.

So why is one so much more popular than the other, despite the lack of buzz?

To bang on yet another of our drums, the streaming services have largely gravitated to what might best be called an “HBO-like” aesthetic.

These are well done, often critically acclaimed shows whose appeal is largely limited to the sort of people who write about TV shows, e.g., educated, affluent younger denizens of the deep blue coastal states. And while this cohort and its opinions tends to dominate the media, that’s about all it dominates: it’s a small slice of the overall population, and while it could easily keep HBO and Showtime in business back in the day, it isn’t large enough to keep a half dozen multibillion dollar streaming services going.

Which is something those services are going to have to come to terms with if they want to succeed. 

The other piece (new drum please) is that no matter how much certain publications and commentators push the whole “TV is Dead” thing, it’s not.

It’s nowhere near where it was in its heyday back in 2012 when 87% of U.S. households had a pay TV subscription. 

And the number of pay TV subscribers is indeed likely to drop from the 71% of U.S. households that have pay TV today.

But it’s not going into freefall.

At some point--we’re thinking when it hits somewhere around 40% of all households, that falloff is going to plateau or sort of plateau and then the industry is going to have to figure out how to deal with a diminished but far from vanishing linear pay TV industry and all the people who still love it or at least still aren’t ready to kick it over for a fully a la carte streaming experience.

These are the people who don’t seem to mind the value exchange of commercial breaks for free TV and who bemoan the absence of more familiar types of sitcoms and dramas on the Flixes.

They are not going anywhere, they spend money and they’ve made a series on Paramount, a little known linear network formerly known as Spike, into a bona fide hit.

Meaning whether you’re an advertiser, a distributor or a programmer, you’re still going to need to pay attention to them in the years ahead.

Deal with it.