Is Pax TV packing it in?
The big question is . . . will much of anyone notice?
The quick and easy answer is . . . no. Pax has never been much of a presence in broadcast television, and it's become even less so recently. Ratings have gone from bad to worse this season, declining 38 percent to an average of 620,000 viewers for its prime-time programming.
To put that in perspective, if one person in each household in the Salt Lake City television market watched Pax during the evening, that would still leave 180,000 households that — like the rest of America — ignore the network. And the Salt Lake television market includes only 0.7 percent of the TV-equipped households in America. Immediately impacted would be KUPX-Ch. 16 in Salt Lake City and KCSG-Ch. 4 in St. George (which is owned by KSL-Ch. 5's parent company, Bonneville Communications).
As for the impact on local viewers, well, it would be negligible . . . because so few local viewers watch Pax. Local ratings books are full of asterisks indicating that Pax audiences are too small to measure.
Pax, for its part, is denying that. But it has announced its intentions to terminate that advertising agreement with NBC.
All sorts of rumors and offers are swirling, including one from entertainer Byron Allen, who's heading a group that has made a $2.2 billion bid for Pax that, if successful, would turn it into a network aimed at African-American viewers.
NBC is in a snit and threatening legal action against Paxson, claiming that attempts to turn Pax into all informercials, all the time will further devalue Paxson Communications and cost the media giant, which invested $415 million in Pax back in 2000, even more than it already has. (Paxson stock has lost more than two-thirds of its value in the past year.)
Pax was launched in 1998 amid much fanfare about how it would be a "family friendly" alternative to the other networks. And its apparent, impending demise is already leading to talk about how family friendly programming can't work in broadcast television.
Which is, of course, sheer baloney. The problem with Pax wasn't the idea behind it, it was the execution of that idea.
There are family friendly shows on other networks that have done quite nicely in the past few years, including current shows like "7th Heaven," "Joan of Arcadia" and "Gilmore Girls." The fact that Pax achieved its greatest success when running reruns of shows like "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" and "Touched by an Angel" is a clear indication that it wasn't the idea behind family programming that was flawed.
Pax's original series — including shows like "Twice in a Lifetime" and "Doc"— were done on the cheap, and it showed. TV viewers are smart enough to see where the money isn't being spent, and Pax didn't have much to spend in the first place.
And its distribution system — a string of mostly UHF stations (60 owned by Paxson itself) may reach 87 percent of American homes in theory, but in practice that reach is considerably less.
If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that you can't just declare yourself family-friendly and expect families to flock to your network. You've got to deliver the goods — shows that they want to watch.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com
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