Are we seeing the beginning of a retrenchment for fringe history on TV? The History Channel pulled Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar from its prime time lineup effective immediately due to the show’s disastrous ratings. Even longtime History stalwart Ancient Aliens has fallen out of the top 100 Friday cable programs. The last Ancient Aliens episode to chart in the cable ratings aired at 3:04 AM on September 4 and drew just 721,000 viewers, of whom 300,000 were in the 18-49 demographic. Presumably, the new episodes that have aired since have done worse since they did not surpass House Hunters International or afternoon Law & Order: SVU reruns. By contrast, Discovery’s Bering Sea Gold is pulling 1.7 million viewers in the same timeslot. But to return to Pirate Treasure: There is no data on the show’s ratings because it did not crack the top 100 Saturday programs in either of its two weeks on the air. That must mean that the show drew fewer viewers than TNT’s 8 AM showing of a Law & Order rerun, which drew fewer than 200,000 viewers in the key 18-49 demographic, used to rank series.
History has moved new episodes of the show to Saturday afternoons, from 5 PM to 7 PM, which happens to be the dinner hour, and opposite college football. We already knew that Pirate Treasure was in trouble when UNESCO condemned it and History decided to burn off episodes on Saturday evenings in double-run episodes. But this no-confidence vote in the series reveals that it wasn’t just a middling burn-off but had become an active liability damaging the network’s ratings and advertising. Because the series will now air from 5 to 7 PM, and this is the aforementioned dinner hour, not to mention when I need to give my cat his pills, I intend to review the episodes later in the evening, assuming my DVR records the show. I wonder if the cycle of fringe history isn’t finally starting to burn out. I’ve noticed that the new wave of unscripted cable series that have found success have focused less on crazy conspiracies, lost civilizations, and aliens and more on treasure hunting. Discovery, for example, found massive ratings success with Treasure Quest: Snake Island a few months ago, and that series might be reasonably compared to Pirate Treasure in terms of how the networks tried to sell the shows, but the differences are more important. Treasure Quest, drawing 1.58 million viewers on Friday nights, was the show that killed off History’s fringe conspiracy show Missing in Alaska (now being burned off on H2). It followed a team of colorful treasure hunters as they trekked through the Brazilian Amazon on a fruitless quest for lost Incan gold, the supposed Treasure of the Trinity. (This is the loot the Portuguese explorer Alexio Garcia amassed in the Brazilian Amazon in 1524, before being killed by Guarani; his treasure, which was mostly silver, ended up in the hands of the Guarani of Paraguay and was dispersed far and wide. Parts of it were found among the Guarani by Sebastian Cabot in his 1526 expedition.) The show devolved into a conspiracy plot in which the bulk of the alleged treasure supposedly was spirited away to the ends of the earth, with made-up clues pointing toward its season two MacGuffin—I mean, final resting place. On the surface, this doesn’t seem to be different than Pirate Treasure, in which Barry Clifford and Scott Wolter engage in a folie à deux as they unconsciously fabricate evidence for a lost Templar treasure in Renaissance-era Madagascar. But the former series cast itself as an adventure rather than an argument, and it spent time building up characters, like supermodel-anthropologist Mehgan Heaney-Grier. The latter never bothered to introduce Clifford or Wolter as characters, expected the audience to do the heavy lifting. The difference was there in the titles: Treasure Quest: Snake Island tells you that it’s an adventure focusing on a place; Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar doesn’t even make sense unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, and it prioritizes conspiracy over fun. In my review of the first week of Pirate Treasure, I said that History had taken the wrong lesson from the success of Curse of Oak Island, a lesson Discovery clearly learned well. I said that History wrongly concluded that audiences wanted more crazy conspiracy theories, whereas the show’s success was really based on the brotherly relationship of the main characters and the audience’s identification with them and their quest. I got pushback on that from Knights Templar super-fans, but I think the failure of Search for the Lost Giants, Missing in Alaska, Legend of the Superstition Mountains, and now Pirate Treasure despite the success of Treasure Quest, Bering Sea Gold, Jungle Gold, and their ilk suggests that I’m right. In my initial review of Oak Island back in 2014, I wrote that “This isn’t really a show about Oak Island. It’s a show about brotherly love and male bonding.” Yet somehow History decided characters should be secondary to sensation, and they paid the price. What we can learn from this is that History would have done better to listen to me. If they were smart, instead of threatening to sue me they’d have been better off hiring me as a consultant since so far I have a better track record of identifying their disastrous decisions than they do. But what does this mean for the $64 question? Given than once a person has appeared on cable television it becomes statistically impossible for executives not to give that person another show due to the sunk cost fallacy, does this mean that Scott Wolter will continue to have a TV career despite helming a titanic ratings disaster?
21 Comments
Only Me
9/26/2015 11:50:47 am
No, no, no, Jason. It means that the global conspiracy to suppress the truth is winning. Who are you going to believe? The stars of fringe shows or those lying ratings?
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Not the Comte de Saint Germain
9/26/2015 01:32:33 pm
It might well be. But if so, another wave of woo will probably rise in a few years, in the same way that the wave of fringe theories in the 1990s was followed, after a few fallow years, by the wave of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
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Clete
9/26/2015 01:23:24 pm
I just finishing watching about twenty minutes of the episode where Scott Wolter hacks his way through the jungle to find the Templar fortress. It appears that the fortress was all ready discovered,excavated and probably restored years before he "found" it.
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Joe Scales
9/26/2015 01:59:47 pm
The History Channel had a change in leadership last week:
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Walt
9/26/2015 03:38:14 pm
I accidentally caught some of this show around 7am this morning, and it was just unwatchable. The most intriguing part of the show was the narrator's pronunciation of Madagascar. He doesn't have a British accent or Boston accent, but he doesn't pronounce the 'r' on the end. Odd.
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John
9/26/2015 06:14:18 pm
If only Wolter knew how to shut up. Another conversation of his over on his blog:
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Kathleen Smith
9/26/2015 07:17:52 pm
Sounds like his resolve is still hard
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Only Me
9/26/2015 07:28:01 pm
According to Scott:
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Shane Sullivan
9/26/2015 07:37:45 pm
"The good news is the debunker blogs are losing readers because people can sniff out BS and quickly grow tired of the over-the-top empty criticism and outright lies."
Joe Scales
9/26/2015 10:32:15 pm
" I don't know or care who's paying them as their efforts will fail in the long run."
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Warren Page
9/27/2015 06:11:27 pm
Plant as in ringer, or plant as in philodendron? Either one works for me...
David Bradbury
9/27/2015 01:04:59 pm
I was motivated by the "debunker blogs are losing readers" comment to check out the Alexa rankings for Jason's site and Scott's blog. That Jason is over one-and-a-half million places higher at the moment is not surprising, but what's amusing is that, after "jason colavito" the search terms leading most frequently to www.jasoncolavito.com are "america unearthed" and "scott wolter".
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Curious
9/26/2015 06:26:59 pm
Does anyone know if the last two episodes of this Pirate Templar mess air tonight? There is another program listed on next Saturday's schedule so it looks like tonight is the end of this series.
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Gary
9/27/2015 08:19:44 am
Giving pills to a cat involves more real danger and guts than anything Wolter has ever done.
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T
9/27/2015 10:19:02 am
Scott Wolter is the best.
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Tony
9/27/2015 02:36:39 pm
The best at lousy ratings?
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John
9/28/2015 06:20:55 am
I'm surprised Scott Wolter has'nt done a follow up post on his blog in regards to any of the episodes of his new show. I wonder why that is...
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John
9/28/2015 06:22:14 am
Sorry I meant "hasn't."
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Dave
9/30/2015 09:02:00 am
The other problem with History Chanel is they'll a whole day of "Ice Road Truckers," "Axe Men," "Ancient Aliens," or whatever other crappy show they have because it's easier to program an entire day of only one show. I can only take about 5 or 10 minutes of anything they broadcast so I wind up watching something else, or sitting outside drinking beer listening to the wind in the leaves. Pretty soon History Chanel will start copying Discovery and we'll get even more "adventure" programming of people searching for gold and/or treasure.
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Becky
10/15/2015 07:51:58 am
I honestly would have Loved this show if they had left out Scott Wolter!!! To me he's a fraud and thinks he knows everything but turns out knows Nothing!
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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