PHOENIX (BP)–After just two weeks, Fox affiliates in Phoenix and Lubbock, Texas, have canceled the CBS-produced TV show featuring radio shock jock Howard Stern.
“It’s ugly. It’s bad TV,” Sue Schwartz, vice president of programming for KTVK, Channel 3, in Phoenix told the Arizona Republic.
Also on Sept. 1, KJTV-TV in Lubbock, Texas, announced it had killed Stern’s show, which the station’s general manager dubbed “morally offensive,” the Phoenix newspaper reported.
In the 33 largest markets measured by Nielsen overnight ratings, Stern’s second show fell to a 3.8 average rating (or percentage of total TV households tuned to a show) and 10 share (viewership percentage among sets in use) from the premiere’s 4.9 rating/12 share, the newspaper reported.
Stern’s show became the first broadcast network series to carry a TV-MA rating on its Aug. 29 second airing, according to news reports. TV-MA is the most restrictive rating of the TV rating system, noting for mature audiences only. The Aug. 22 debut carried a TV-14 rating.
Among Stern’s initial advertisers was The Disney Company film subsidiary Miramax pictures, according to the American Family Association, which has opposed the CBS show and is among the leaders of a national Disney boycott.
The show is being aired on 12 of the 14 CBS-owned affiliates and was distributed to non-CBS stations also, according to news reports.
The TV-MA rating has been used only twice on broadcast television — for the movie “Schindler’s List” and the pilot episode of CBS’ “Brooklyn South” — since the voluntary system was instituted in early 1997, The Post reported.
Tim Wildmon, vice president of the American Family Association, said in a written release after the initial show, “Stern’s sewage is now pouring into our society on Saturday late-night television, and the brand name on the bilge pump is CBS.
“CBS executives owe the American people” an apology, Wildmon said.
KTVK’ Schwartz said she will continue to screen the Stern show and will consider returning it to the 10:35 p.m. Saturday time slot in Phoenix if improvements are made, the Arizona Republic reported.
Schwartz said the station had received a roughly equal number of negative and positive viewer phone calls about the show.
