“A discount of 47% compared to programs broadcast in the same programming slot”
TF1, joined by Challenges, justifies the deprogramming as follows: “During the last two broadcasts, the average audience share recorded a discount of 47% on the target of individuals aged 4 and over, compared to the programs broadcast during the previous four weeks in the same programming box. ” Faced with this decline, the channel explains having changed its programming – it says that the game will be rescheduled “at a later date” without specifying the schedule or the channel of the TF1 group.
The second issue of District Z, which aired on December 18, drew 1.58 million viewers, or 7.8% of the public. A score far from the 4.7 million spectators of the leader France 3 that night. “It’s really catastrophic”, slice Virginie Spies, lecturer and media analyst at the University Avignon.
900,000 euros per issue
Satisfaction, Arthur’s production company, had revised its copy for its second season based on study panels. More pace and more challenges: the program wanted to inflate its audiences after a first season followed on average by 3.11 million spectators. But the efforts did not pay off.
The game had nevertheless seen the big picture: a shoot on ten hectares (the equivalent of fourteen football fields) in a former setting of Parc Astérix, 300 people on the set each evening, a star host – Denis Brogniart, 90 km of cables buried underground… And the budget that goes with it. If we follow the estimate of 900.00 euros per show, the price of the season of five episodes would turn around 4.5 million euros, nearly 1% of the fortune of Arthur, shareholder at 72% of the company Satisfaction.
A programming error
For Virginie Spies, the failure of the show is explained above all by a programming error on the part of TF1. “This is not a family show on Saturday night, first part of the evening”. And this even less during the holiday season: “At Christmas, we want feel good, light. There, the music is scary, it screams a lot. You can’t imagine grandparents who babysit their grandchildren watching that ”.
Like Fort Boyard, the game indeed plunged celebrities into a fictional universe, that of Professor Z and his horde of zombies, with a simple spring: to collect money for an association by taking up challenges. These similarities with the broadcast of France 2 had created controversy during the first season of the program. For Virginie Spies, they also explain the failure of the program: “It’s a kind of Fort Boyard, without its advantages. It’s not fun enough, not funny enough. It’s a dark show, it takes place at night. We are attacked by zombies, there is a climate of terror. ”
“A mayonnaise that does not take”
“A mayonnaise which does not take”, summarizes Laurence Leveneur, lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University of Toulouse 1 and at the IUT of Rodez, which points out the length of the program – 2h30 . The specialist in games and television entertainment qualifies, however: “Adventure games, there are a lot of them, there is not an infinite possibility of innovating compared to Fort Boyard. We must welcome the initiative of an original creation, in a context where television creates few new games ”.
Unlike other entertainment games scheduled for the first part of the evening by TF1, Quarter Z is in fact neither an adaptation of a foreign program (as ninja warrior Where Singer Mask), nor a safe bet that has been around for years (Koh Lanta, The voice).
The difficulty of installing new formats
And this should not have played in favor of the program, explains Virginie Spies: “It is not easy to install new formats. There are times when you can’t. At Christmas, the stakes are very high for advertisers. Programming it at such an important time was a huge risk-taking for TF1. The channel promises advertisers a certain audience. If she does not keep the commitments, she must return the money to them. ” With the competition that the Internet represents in terms of advertising revenue for television, it is therefore impossible to maintain the program, adds Laurence Leneveur.
The lecturer places the program’s fiasco in a broader context: “TV games have lost ground, compared to the 1980s, in particular on private channels”. The researcher thus underlines the rarefaction of games distributed in prime time, the most exposed time slot, around 9 p.m. She also recalls that between 1950 and 2007, 600 games were created, of which very few have remained in the annals.
“Arthur has seen others”
The deprogramming deals a blow to TF1, the broadcaster, and to Satisfaction, the producer. For TF1, the expensive program should have been a source of advertising revenue, particularly important at a time of great audience like the prime time. On the first channel of France, the price of thirty seconds of advertising for a program of the first part of the evening can go up to 100,000 euros if it works well. “TF1 is also losing in terms of notoriety, adds Laurence Leveneur. The channel takes the risk of damaging its brand image ”. For Virginie Spies, “the period is a little hard for the entertainment of TF1”, marked very recently by a cheating scandal in the show Koh Lanta.
As for the production company, if we do not know the precise clauses of its contract, Virginie Spies explains that, when a broadcaster signs a contract with a producer, the latter’s remuneration by the channel is conditioned on the audiences that ‘he realizes – here bad. And that, while an original creation is expensive, adds Laurence Leveneur: “Developing a game is a big risk-taking, which costs a lot more money than buying than a pre-existing format”. “Arthur is someone who has seen others, reassures Virginie Spies. He’s a producer who dares things, and there aren’t that many ”.
District Z reloaded was replaced at short notice by a Christmas blooper on Saturday, December 25. The show, which only cost the establishment of a set of animators and the rights to the images broadcast, was seen by 2.76 million viewers. That’s over a million more viewers compared to the adventure game the week before.
