Illustration by Justin MetzOne month later, the only thing that’s come true from that grandiose intro is the part about stumbling. The show’s first episode, which aired on Sept. 7 in a desirable time slot following an NFL game, averaged a mediocre 4.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen (NLSN). This despite a heavy marketing push, including commercials that
ran throughout the summer and a social media blitz. (At the time of the premiere, Laurel Bernard, Fox’s executive vice president for marketing, said 25 to 30 people at the network were working on the marketing alone.) Two nights later, the audience for the second episode fell to 2.4 million. Viewership has continued to drop. “That’s a formula for a quick cancellation,” says Patrick Keane, a media analyst and executive, now president of native-advertising company Sharethrough. “In broadcast television, it’s impossible to have patience.”
Part of the appeal of reality TV, from a network’s perspective, is that it’s typically cheap to make and, if it fails, cheap to abandon. A recent Jefferies report found that, on average, reality TV costs $10,000 per minute to produce, vs. $50,000 per minute for scripted programming. The format of Utopia, however, required producers not only to build an entire sustainable community outfitted with reams of state-of-the-art surveillance equipment but also to keep the whole shebang going for a year on TV and on the Web. Various press reports have pegged the initial price tag of the series at about $50 million. Fox declined to comment.
The Utopia debacle began in 2013 when Mike Darnell, the longtime head of Fox’s reality programming, announced he was stepping down. The network replaced him with Simon Andreae, a British TV executive known on both sides of the Atlantic for cranking out an endless parade of titillating pop-science shows such as My Breasts Could Kill Me, Forbidden Love: Geisha, and The Science of Sex Appeal. Not long after joining Fox, Andreae heard a pitch for Utopia, the brainchild of Dutch media mogul John de Mol, the creator of some of the most lucrative reality series in history, including Big Brother and The Voice. A European version of Utopia was already airing in the Netherlands and doing well. Andreae flew there and snapped up the American rights before any rivals could even bid.
For much of the past decade, Fox had coasted along near the top of the TV dog pile, largely based on the reliable strength of its live sports programming and the American Idol juggernaut. But in recent years, interest in Idol has waned—the average audience per episode dropped from a peak of 30.2 million viewers during the 2005-06 season to 13.2 million in 2012-13, according to Horizon Media—and Fox has struggled to find a replacement hit. Along the way, the network has rolled out several lackluster reality shows, including this summer’s disastrous I Wanna Marry Harry, in which a Prince Harry impersonator tricked women into falling in love with him. It was quickly canceled. In February the network also pulled the plug on its alternate singing competition series, The X Factor, following several seasons of dwindling ratings. In May, Fox finished last in total viewers among the big four broadcast networks. After premiere week this September, it remained mired at the bottom. (Chairman of Entertainment Kevin Reilly stepped down in May.)
If Utopia worked, the network could use it to fill large chunks of airtime not only during the fall but also throughout the spring and summer of the following year. The pioneers were in place. The robotic cameras were rolling. The longer the series ran, the more Fox could amortize its high initial costs. In August, Chase Carey, the chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox, told analysts during a conference call that the network was well-positioned for a comeback. He specifically mentioned Utopia as one of the signs of hope.
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