Football and Glee, a match made in heaven?

I'm not a big football fan, but I always enjoy watching the Super Bowl.  The crazy fans, the half-time show, the ridiculous beer commercials...what's not to love?  And if you get bored, you can always switch over to Animal Planet for the annual Puppy Bowl.  But one of the most interesting things about the Super Bowl, in my opinion, is the show that follows the highest-rated televised event of the year.

There's also a kitten half-time show, in case the puppies cute aren't enough.

Airing the Super Bowl is an opportunity for a network to do some serious branding (i.e.: it's a great way to get viewers to watch a network and develop strong associations with it, thus encouraging them to tune into that network again).  You see the same thing with the Olympics, the Oscars, and any other "big event."  Imagine if you were a network executive.  Pretty much everybody watches the Super Bowl, which means that for one night, everybody will be watching your network--they'll be seeing your logo in the corner of their screens and view promos for your television shows.  But most importantly, the network that covers the Super Bowl has a chance to schedule one of its regular shows after the Bowl, resulting in a huge audience turn-over and usually outstanding ratings for that show.

It's called lead-out programming.  The idea is that most people are too lazy to change the channel or turn off the TV after the program they want to watch is finished (this is less true today with remote controls and DVRs, but it's still a surprisingly effective programming strategy).  So, when a network wants a show to get high ratings, they tend to schedule it after a very popular show.  

Sometimes I ask myself, how does Chuck Lorre do it?

A good example of this would be CBS's The Big Bang Theory.  In its first season, it was scheduled after How I Met Your Mother, a popular Monday night comedy.  This helped Theory, a new show, earn an average of 8 million viewers.  But in the middle of it's second season, it was placed after Two and a Half Men, which is CBS's highest-rated comedy.  There, it got much better ratings, and after it's third season, it averaged about 14 million viewers.  I do not mean to attribute all of Theory's success to where it was placed in the schedule, but the correlation with higher ratings is clearly more than a coincidence.  Now in it's fourth season the show is so successful that CBS has moved it to Thursday nights at 8 and is using it as a lead-in to their new show $#*! My Dad Says.  It's the circle of life.

And it moves us all...

Obviously, placing a show after the Super Bowl is not exactly the same.  For one thing, it is an example of stunting, because the Super Bowl is not a regular event.  That is usually why the lead-off Super Bowl show is a slightly unusual episode.  For example, in 2009, a one-hour long episode of The Office (a normally half-hour sitcom) followed the Super Bowl.  Most of the shows that air after the Super Bowl have benefited a great deal from the exposure such as Survivor, Grey's Anatomy, and Undercover Boss, the latter of which premiered after the Super Bowl and became the most popular new show of season.

This year, FOX has chosen sophomore hit, Glee as the lead-off.  This will no doubt be Glee's highest rated episode yet.  Of course, this a show that has employed some very clever strategies to attain its popularity.  Glee originally employed "premier stunting" or, starting a show in a favorable time slot and moving it at a later date, in order to get the buzz going with fans.  The pilot episode premiered on May 19, 2009 and the network did not air the next episode until the beginning of the fall season.  In between that time the cast did mall-tours and promotions, encouraging fans to watch the show and creating buzz all summer.  This helped the show create a fan base that has grown with each season.  Glee also uses "stunt casting" and special episodes to increase viewer-ship, such as the "Britney/Brittany" episode which included cameos by Britney Spears and was the second highest-rated episode to date.

Now the question is, how much will Glee benefit by following the Super Bowl?  It's hard to say.  Obviously, ratings will sky-rocket, but Glee might not succeed as much as previous lead-off shows simply because it is not tailor-made for the average Super Bowl viewer.  Compared to the extremely family and viewer-friendly, average-Joe-inspired reality show Undercover Boss, which lead-off last year, Glee just does not have the same mass-appeal.  But the Glee cast and crew are obviously doing everything in their power to make this the best episode yet.  This will be the most expensive episode of the show, costing $3-5 million to make, and will feature the cast singing Michael Jackson's "Thriller," as well as Katy Perry's "California Gurls," which will include fire-breathers and bikini-clad cheerleaders in an attempt to attract the male demographic.  Having seen the clip, all I have to say is...yeah, good luck with that.  But you can judge for yourself when Glee premiers its newest episode tonight after the Super Bowl.