According to data supplied by the Weather Channel, the audience for Weather Geeks is up 19 percent over the same period last year.Ī big reason why cable television is struggling is because it has a very low value-to-time ratio. The network’s other science-heavy offering, Weather Geeks, a Sunday-morning talk show about meteorology, launched last year it has outpaced the tepid ratings growth of the network as a whole.

With Weather Underground, the Weather Channel is betting on hordes of geeks-its original audience back in the ’80s and ’90s, before the network began a misguided experiment in reality programming-to boost viewership. So far in 2015, just 66,000 people in the crucial 18-to-49 demographic watch the network during primetime on average. A whopping 73 percent of its primetime viewers this year are over the age of 50. From a business standpoint, the Weather Channel is best summed up as an efficient vehicle to sell prescription drugs to older men. Clickbait-heavy is now estimated to be worth more than the television network that launched it. The Weather Channel’s parent, the Weather Company, is owned by private equity firms that may be forced to split up the company’s digital and broadcast divisions if on-air ratings don’t rebound. Weather Underground is an attempt to soothe the nerves of potential Weather Channel buyers and amounts to a major re-think of its weekday primetime live coverage. “I’m also monitoring live weather and advancing graphics during discussions so I can’t be separated from the bar often.”

“We’re still trying to figure out new positions to try with the set,” she said.

After Monday night’s premiere, I briefly chatted on Twitter with Dillingham, who said she and her colleagues were “ecstatic” about the first episode.

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