Remember how Billy Crystal’s character, Mitch Robbins, tried to explain his job as a media rep in “City Slickers” to a classroom of kids on Career Day? “Basically, I sell air.”

By Mitch Silver

Remember how Billy Crystal’s character, Mitch Robbins, tried to explain his job as a media rep in “City Slickers” to a classroom of kids on Career Day? “Basically, I sell air.”

Well, right now we’re in the midst of the November Sweeps, the period in which the A.C. Nielsen Company tabulates the viewership of all the programs on all those hundreds of channels in the TV listings. Those numbers, describing the size and quality of each show’s audience, will set the prices for the “air” the Mitch’s of the world will go out and sell to local TV advertisers.

Is it any wonder then, with so much riding on November’s viewership, that there’s “stunting” going on? A stunt, as the name suggests, is the special effort producers and show-runners make to get you to watch. Some of it is baked in the cake, like starting the seventh season of “The Voice” so the live playoffs just happen to run in November. Important, because “The Voice” goes up against two Tuesday mega-hits from CBS — “NCIS” and “NCIS: New Orleans.”

Other stunts are specially concocted, like the wedding on “Two and a Half Men.” Or last week’s NBC three-part crossover story about cracking a child porno ring that aired on Tuesday’s “Chicago Fire” and ‘”Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Chicago P.D.” on Wednesday.

As it happens, Dick Wolf produces all three shows in association with Universal Television. “It was a little tricky,” according to Wolf, “with two shows set in Chicago and one in New York. But it wasn’t too far-fetched to develop a story about child pornography that crosses state lines.”

The results? “Chicago Fire” benefitted both from the big lead-in audience for the live playoffs on “The Voice” as well as the three-episode stunt, earning a 2.2 rating among all adults 18-49, up 29% from the previous week’s 1.7 rating. (The rating score means 2.4% of America’s total of 127 million adults aged 18-49, who live in a household with a TV, were tuned in.)

The following evening, “Law and Order: SVU” did even better, earning a 2.4, up 50%. And “Chicago Fire” held most of that audience with 2.2, a 57% bump up from the week before. Overall, stunting won NBC both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with more than ten million viewers each evening for a 7 share.

The share number simply acknowledges that overall TV watching in primetime is greater in midweek than on Friday or Saturday nights, when the younger half of the audience tends to go out. So “share” is based on those watching at a specific time, not on the whole 127 million Americans above age 17 and below 50 (sorry, seniors, we just don’t count.) Of course, with DVR recordings, on-demand showings, and alternative viewing venues like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, overnight numbers don’t fully describe a show’s audience, only the ones that happen to be tuned in when it originally airs. Which means the numbers will certainly go up over time.

Ten million NBC viewers per night may sound good. So, how does 17.3 million sound? That’s how many sets of eyeballs watched the Seahawks dismantle the Giants on FOX Sunday, November 9, becoming the week’s most-watched show by scoring a 6.2 rating among 18-49s.

Still, Lucille Ball would have laughed at those numbers. In 1952, her “I Love Lucy” show won over half the total audience, an enormous 53.8 rating.

The next year, the audience actually grew to more than two-thirds of all possible viewers tuning in. Of course, those were the days when three networks and maybe a couple of independent stations were all you had to choose from. Even so, the average airing of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” 15 years after Lucy still had an audience more than twice as big as any weekly show gets today.

All of which helps explain why Budweiser and Pepsi and even GoDaddy will pay all those millions for 30 seconds on the Super Bowl. Because it’s the once-a-year NFL extravaganza — and only the NFL extravaganza — that earns ratings Lucy would even deem competitive: the most recent game achieved a 46.7 rating. (The big number, though, is the total audience. With tens of millions more screens out there than in Ms. Ball’s day, Super Bowl XLVIII had more than 112 million Americans watching last year, the biggest viewer group in TV history.)

So, enjoy the November Sweeps. But remember, they’re only fighting over scraps.