Dramas that air one episode per week, such as “The Killing Vote” and “A Good Day To Be A Dog”, are struggling
SBS’s Thursday series “The Killing Vote” will end quietly on November 16th. In the meantime, MBC’s Wednesday series “A Good Day To Be A Dog” continues to be delayed due to baseball broadcasts, which results in viewers losing interest in the drama.
In the case of “The Killing Vote”, it was originally organized as a Mon-Tue drama with two episode releases a week. However, SBS suddenly canceled the Mon-Tue broadcasting slot for dramas so “The Killing Vote” was moved to Thursday. “A Good Day To Be A Dog” was chosen as the experimental work for MBC’s newly established Wednesday drama section. Both SBS and MBC decided to organize their drama with one episode per week and also showed strong confidence, but the results were the opposite.
At first, “The Killing Vote” gained attention through word-of-mouth and thrilled viewers with exciting twists. However, as developments began to slow down due to the unusual broadcast plan, many viewers eventually dropped in the middle of the drama. Despite starring veteran actors Park Sung-woong, Park Hae-jin, and “The Glory” star Lim Ji-yeon, “The Killing Vote” could not overcome the adverse effects of this risky broadcasting method and is expected to end with a rating below 3%.
“A Good Day To Be A Dog” not only challenged the risky programming method of airing once a week but also suffered unexpected broadcast cancellations due to professional baseball events. After the first two-week break, the drama witnessed a significant drop to 1% rating.
In fact, terrestrial broadcasters are trying to reduce drama schedules to the point that some viewers have complained about having no dramas to watch on TV. This situation can be explained based on the logic of money. It is calculated that the production cost for a drama is too large compared to the amount they earn from the broadcasts.
The emergence of OTT platforms, such as Netflix, the decline in advertising revenue due to the economic crisis and the increase in actors’ appearance fees make broadcasters hesitate to invest a lot in dramas. As such, they have no choice but to choose and invest only in potential hits that can bring about significant success.
Of course, there are works that survived this one-braodcast-per-week programming. “Penthouse 3” with unpredictable developments and the “Hospital Playlist” series were able to achieve both high ratings and hot topics although they released only one episode every week. While “Penthouse 3” kept viewers curious about the ending until the final episode, “Hospital Playlist” was created with an independent story in every episode so there was no need to watch continuously to understand the entire drama.
Regarding this situation, a broadcasting official commented, “As OTT continues to grow, viewers have become more accustomed to drama rewatch. Therefore, airing one episode per week is not an efficient way to solve the current crisis that terrestrial broadcasters are facing”.
Source: Daum
