Chapter 157: The Storm Dissipates
Chapter 157: The Storm Dissipates
On Wednesday, the newly produced episode of The Sophia Talk Show officially aired on CBS. The original guest for this episode was supposed to be a famous football player. When many football fans sat in front of their televisions waiting for their idol to appear, they discovered that the guest had been changed to the young director Eric Williams. Some diehard fans even called the television station to question them.
But most television viewers were not that picky. Instead, they felt pleasantly surprised. After all, Eric’s current influence was not something a football player could compare with.
“Wow, so that’s how gunfight scenes are filmed. That’s so cool.”
...
“Eric Williams’s deadpan jokes are hilarious. The robbers are playing poker with the SWAT members, haha...”
...
“Why doesn’t Drew Barrymore ever show her face? Ever since Back to Seventeen, there hasn’t been any news about her in the media.”
...
“Eric is really scary when he gets angry. He doesn’t look like that kind of person at all.”
“That’s nothing strange. He’s so young. If he wants employees older than him to listen, how can he manage without being a little fierce?”
...
All kinds of discussions appeared in front of televisions in countless households. Because of summer vacation, the proportion of teenagers watching television had increased greatly, and Eric’s influence among teenagers was probably even higher than that of ordinary idols. After all, as someone of the same age, if you surpassed others by a hundred meters, that might trigger all kinds of envy, jealousy, and hatred. But if you surpassed them by ten thousand meters, what you received would mostly be worship. Therefore, when many young people saw Eric rarely appearing on television, they could not help calling their classmates’ homes with the urge to share it and remind them to watch the program.
The influence of The Sophia Talk Show was far from comparable to The Oprah Winfrey Show. Although the latter had only appeared a few years earlier, each episode averaged more than eleven million viewers. Meanwhile, the follow-the-trend The Sophia Talk Show only had an average viewership of around four million.
At the beginning of this episode, the original viewership data was only 4.2 million. But as the program aired, the ratings curve soared all the way upward. By the time the forty-minute program finished, the number of viewers had stopped at 7.5 million, almost doubling. After the program ended, CBS’s hotline was directly flooded with calls.
“If we could have promoted it a week in advance, the program’s ratings definitely would have exceeded ten million,” a CBS executive said regretfully after seeing the ratings statistics.
Among the audience hotline calls, more than seventy percent hoped that CBS could rebroadcast the episode as soon as possible. The remaining thirty percent consisted of all kinds of miscellaneous reasons. Some people hoped the Running Out of Time crew could appear on the program together. Some hoped to see Drew and Eric appear onscreen together. A large portion also asked whether the videotapes in Eric’s hands would be released to the market.
CBS organized the audience feedback into documents and forwarded them to Columbia and Firefly. At the same time, following public opinion, they also sent invitations to Eric, Drew, and several lead actors from Running Out of Time. Although Columbia was very tempted, since this could once again build momentum for the film’s promotion, Eric and the others refused.
If not for clarifying the rumor, Eric would never have gone on a talk show to show his face in the first place. Since Eric refused, Drew certainly would not go either.
Meanwhile, Cruise and Hanks’s agents both felt that this program’s influence was somewhat too small and did not match the status of the two superstars. Brooke Shields, however, was somewhat tempted. Running Out of Time had brought a very good turning point for her career. But after CBS was rejected by Eric and the two Toms, it no longer had much interest. If the other major names were not going on, inviting the woman alone would not have much topicality. After all, Brooke Shields had only appeared in Running Out of Time for a few short minutes. Although The Sophia Talk Show’s influence was far inferior to Oprah, CBS was still a national television network and had not yet reached the point of taking whatever it could get.
Although the invitations were rejected, after communicating with all sides, CBS quickly came up with a way to maximize its profits. When Eric participated in the recording, more than two hours of material had been accumulated, while the talk show itself only had forty minutes of airtime.
Thus, CBS re-edited the more than two hours of material into two episodes, upper and lower parts, and aired them separately over the next two days. Because they deliberately did brief promotion during the evening prime-time slot, the re-edited first part reached nine million viewers the next day. When the second part aired on Friday, ratings directly broke through ten million viewers and even reached twelve million at its peak.
For a daytime program, a viewership of ten million was enough to receive ace-program treatment. The Oprah Winfrey Show was precisely built into a brilliance that lasted more than twenty years because of this average result.
In order to preserve the achievement, CBS directly abandoned several already-produced episodes and spent a large sum inviting other relatively important guests, attempting to build a talk show that could rival Oprah. But in the end, they could only be disappointed. Just as Eric had judged back then, the biggest problem with this program lay with the host, Sophia Temple. It was not that she was not excellent, but that Sophia Temple’s personality was not suited to hosting a talk show.
Therefore, after the second week, although the show replaced its guests with relatively important figures, the ratings still slowly slid downward after experiencing one miraculous peak. In the end, CBS could only give up its efforts. The few episodes in which Eric participated became an unsurpassable peak for the talk show. Until the show was cut by CBS and Sophia Temple moved behind the scenes, its ratings never reached such heights again.
Of course, all of this came later. After CBS’s talk show aired, the ghost director controversy surrounding Running Out of Time quickly vanished like smoke. After all, after that talk show aired, especially the later upper and lower episodes, the program played more than twenty minutes of filming footage. From Eric arranging the scene, explaining performances to the actors, and showing the detailed shooting process, everything was displayed clearly before the audience. The large-scale scenes that appeared from time to time, such as blocked-off streets, also told everyone that the videotapes could not possibly have been forged. Therefore, anyone who still raised this kind of doubt afterward was purely testing the audience’s intelligence.
After The Sophia Talk Show aired, George Nosen also stopped jumping around. Columbia Pictures directly pressured Premiere magazine and forced them to fire him. After all, because of one article from George Nosen, Columbia had nearly suffered immeasurable losses. If Columbia did nothing at all, it would seem far too easy to bully.
Although the other major film companies secretly applauded George Nosen’s article for making trouble for Columbia, they also did not want this kind of thing to happen to them in the future. Therefore, George Nosen, as a film critic, was also placed on the blacklist of the Big Six film companies.