Samurai and Super Samurai Scheduling

Well, what idiot came up with the scheduling of Samurai? I’ve been sitting on this topic for a while, essentially waiting until the whole of Samurai had finished airing. It was a frustrating wait. So what is the deal with scheduling, and why is it so frustrating? Well, since Megaforce is just around the corner, I thought now would be the best time to dive into this annoying topic...

19	"Origins - Part 1"	October 15, 2011 (2011-10-15)
20	"Origins - Part 2"	October 22, 2011 (2011-10-22)
1	"The Team Unites"	February 7, 2011 (2011-02-07)
2	"Deal With a Nighlok"	February 13, 2011 (2011-02-13)
3	"Day Off"	February 20, 2011 (2011-02-20)
4	"Sticks & Stones"	February 27, 2011 (2011-02-27)
5	"A Fish Out of Water"	March 6, 2011 (2011-03-06)
6	"There Go the Brides"	March 13, 2011 (2011-03-13)
7	"I've Got a Spell on Blue"	March 20, 2011 (2011-03-20)
8	"Forest for the Trees"	March 27, 2011 (2011-03-27)
9	"Test of the Leader"	April 10, 2011 (2011-04-10)
10	"Jayden's Challenge"	April 17, 2011 (2011-04-17)
11	"Unexpected Arrival"	April 30, 2011 (2011-04-30)
12	"Room for One More"	May 7, 2011 (2011-05-07)
13	"The Blue and the Gold"	May 14, 2011 (2011-05-14)
14	"Team Spirit"	May 21, 2011 (2011-05-21)
15	"The Tengen Gate"	May 28, 2011 (2011-05-28)
16	"Boxed In"	June 4, 2011 (2011-06-04)
17	"Broken Dreams"	October 1, 2011 (2011-10-01)
18	"The Ultimate Duel"	October 8, 2011 (2011-10-08)
21	"Party Monsters"	October 29, 2011 (2011-10-29)
22	"Clash of the Red Rangers the Movie"	November 26, 2011 (2011-11-26)
23	"Christmas Together, Friends Forever"	December 10, 2011 (2011-12-10)

OK, so first thing’s first- the timing of the premiere. As everyone knows, it was aired long after the show began, which of course makes no sense. There are some mumblings that the episode was named “Origins” due to various fan discussion, but that’s a pretty minor point. “The Team Unites”, which is the first aired episode, clearly was not supposed to be the first episode and the storytelling suffers as a result. That’s the problem you get when you show things out of order... and that happens another time this season.

Scheduling was interesting at the beginning. “The Team Unites” was aired on a Monday, then subsequent episodes aired on Sunday every week until April 3rd, when the show took a week off. “Jayden’s Challenge” and “Unexpected Arrival” aired two weeks in a row, followed by two weeks off. The show was then moved to Saturdays because it was a slot that was receiving good ratings. It played every week until June the fourth.

This is where the first big hiatus happened. Since the show has a low number of episodes, having breaks was bound to happen. I do not like this, but it’s something I as a fan have had to put up with. June the fourth to October the first saw no new episodes airing at all. This was a frustrating hiatus because it was pretty long, and the show really didn’t have much of a cliffhanger to make people on the edge of their seats hoping for a resolution.

October the first and eighth saw episodes, then there was the actual airing of the first two episodes, and then “Party Monsters”. I didn’t expect too much out of this clip show, and I was pleasantly surprised. I suppose it was nice to see an original idea come out of the writer’s room, but hey, they didn’t have a script to put through Google Translate this time.

After that was CotRR on November 26th. A small break, but nothing unexpected. This was the last thing filmed and it shows- the acting is the best it is all season, the cast gel a lot better, and the writers decided to throw a bone to all those annoying Memily shippers out there. Of course, the timing of the episode makes no sense. Jayden uses weapons that he hasn’t gotten yet, so the episode is clearly supposed to go into Super Samurai, not Samurai.

December 10 then saw the Christmas special. I don’t have anything to say about that.

I’ll discuss the three main dips in the ratings. The first happened for episode eight, which really didn’t seem to be due to the scheduling but possibly because of the product itself. The boost in the ratings for the next episode is interesting because it was after a week off. The next big dip happened for episode 17, which is after the big hiatus I discussed above. The ratings didn’t really recover from the fall, and reached an all time low for the airing of CotRR.

There was a bounce for episode 13, possibly because there was some enthusiasm for the arrival of a new ranger, possibly one with a competent actor. This of course was a transitory spike and went back down to the general level the show was on at the time.

1	Super Samurai	February 18th
2	Shell Game	February 25th
3	Trading Places	March 3rd
4	Something Fishy	March 10th
5	The Rescue	March 17th
6	The Bullzord	March 24th
7	He Ain’t Heavy Metal, He’s My Brother	March 31st
8	Kevin’s Choice	April 7th
9	Runaway Spike	April 14th
10	The Strange Case of the Munchies	April 21st
11	A Sticky Situation	April 28th
12	Trust Me	May 5th
13	The Master Returns	May 12th
14	A Crack in the World	October 13th
15	Trickster Treat	October 27th
16	Stroke of Fate	November 3rd
17	Fight Fire With Fire	November 10th
18	The Great Duel	November 17th
19	Evil Reborn	November 24th
20	The Sealing Symbol	December 1st
21	Samurai Forever	December 8th
22	Stuck On Christmas	December 15th

OK, so there’s a couple of things to comment on here. The first 13 episodes aired on a weekly schedule. As the weeks wore on, I got more and more concerned- there aren’t many episodes, and there are 52 weeks in a year. A hiatus is coming, and the longer the show is on a weekly schedule, the longer the hiatus will be.

Of course, it turned out to be a mammoth one.May 12th to October 13th- five months of repeats and of course little actual promotion. Nick didn’t promote that new episodes were returning (at least not vigorously as it should have been... I’m relying on what I’ve read here). How many of the viewers remembered what the story was by the time the show returned?

There was a small break, followed by one of the most dreadful episodes of PR ever made (I did a review of it), only being beaten by Alpha’s Magical Christmas as the worst episode. I’ll make my stance on reviewing bad episodes clear here- I in general do not enjoy reviewing things I dislike, but I felt that this episode warranted an exception because of just how painful it is. I won’t make a habit of it though.

After that mini rant, the show went on a weekly schedule until the final episode Samurai Forever and another clip show that said “the best thing the female rangers did was go shopping”. Bitter? Me? Never. The scheduling for this season was really odd, it’s hard to tell whether Nick had a “let’s get this shit out of the way and pound heaps out weekly” attitude or “Get them hooked with a wave of new episodes, and hopefully they’ll stick around during the hiatus”. From what I’ve heard about their promotion of the show, it seems likely that it’s more the former than the latter, which is concerning.

Please note the break is due to the lack of info for episode 10.

Anyway, the graph shows that the ratings start around the same region that Samurai ended- around the 2,2 million mark. It wiggled around there until the hiatus... and then plunged down to 1.2 million. Ratings started to recover (perhaps word spread via the internet the show had started again, hopefully making up for the lack of promotion?) and ended up a little lower than when the season started.

Now for the fun part- combining the two graphs together!

As is plainly obvious, the graph has a general downward trend. There’s a peak in the late part of the first season, but it inevitably ended up going down. With a peak approaching 4 million and an end point of around 2.2 million (with a low point where it nearly touched one million) it seems that there was initial interest which died down.

So there’s the question: why? Several answers have been given for this:

1- Nick didn’t like the show and under promoted it. Even Megaforce only saw its first promo two weeks before the show’s premiere. A sign of things to come?

2- Nick wanted the show to succeed, and it didn’t meet certain benchmarks, and it fell out of favour.

3- People turned off because of the quality of the show itself.

4- Downloads are affecting ratings

It’s most likely a combination of the above, but since we’re going to have to endure at least another two years of this sort of scheduling... well, it’s not good, eh?