Some humour is universal. Some, however, clearly isn’t and the critically lauded but audience challenged US showbiz comedy series “30 Rock”, starring Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey, is quite obviously one of the latter group.
The comedy series received its much hyped premiere on German television on Sunday, via digital network ZDFNeo, to an audience of less than five thousand people. The numbers were so bad, in fact, that the “official” rating for the series’ debut was 0.0 million viewers. The show struggles to get attract viewers even in the US despite it being a major critical darling and awards favourite (an eight million rating for the new season premiere has since dwindled to an average of about six million), but a 0.0 rating seems almost cruel.
Promotion cannot be blamed, either, with the ZDFNeo channel, which is run by Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF, having given the show much hype and positive spin, making it the centerpiece of a much vaunted network revamp – costing several million – designed to give more room for cutting edge programming aimed at a younger demographic. It appears that neither the older nor the younger demographic were interested, however, with the rating below even the worst predictions of ZDFNeo’s network forecasters. Other shows were not exactly making waves in the ratings either, however, and so far the network’s revamp does not appear to be going as planned, but the failure of “30 Rock” is certainly the most embarrassing result… and for more people than just ZDFNeo.
