LOS ANGELES — Bill Engvall has not yet seen the overnight ratings for “The Bill Engvall Show.” It’s the morning after the premiere of the sitcom’s second season, and he’s concerned.
“Last night it was hard to get excited when you’re going up against the NBA finals,” said Engvall, one-fourth of the popular “Blue Collar Comedy” troupe. “Not that the entire country watches (the finals), but it does take a huge audience away from you.”
Basketball, however, is the least of his worries.
On television, “Engvall” has become something of an anomaly: a multicamera family sitcom played before a live audience in which the lead guy is actually married with children. “The Bill Engvall Show” airs at 9 p.m. Thursdays on TBS.
Once the staple of broadcast television, the traditional family sitcom has been relegated of late to niche cable channels like TBS.
“Engvall” — with its current season average of 2.4 million viewers, up 8 percent over last year — is considered a ratings success for TBS. But those numbers don’t come close to past broadcast network family hits such as “Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire,” “Home Improvement” or “The Cosby Show,” which at its peak in the late ’80s averaged 63 million viewers.
“The family comedy is like that kid in the corner of the quad who’s not the coolest kid, but he’s a good solid kid,” said Michael Wright, senior vice president of content creation for TNT, TBS and TCM.
In recent years, the proliferation of Internet and video game usage and the overall fragmentation of the American family has undermined the traditional family comedy “in a big way,” said Brian Lowry, television critic for the entertainment trade paper Daily Variety. “It’s not as much about let’s gather around the hearth and watch together as it is, I’m going in my room and watch what I want; you go in your room and watch what you want.”
“I won’t lie to you; it’s been an uphill battle,” said Engvall, commenting on the struggle to bring new audiences to his show, despite less than glowing reviews, including TV.com’s appraisal: “a complete waste of time.”
But Engvall is not giving up.
“At our tapings, I can’t tell you the number of people who come up to me personally and go, ‘Thanks for bringing family back to TV,’ (or) the e-mails I get all the time from people saying, ‘Thanks for doing it the way you do it,’” he said. “So we’re going to ride this horse … for better or worse, we’re going to ride it.”
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