Fall-TV’s hot new trend: Viewer attrition!

If you’re looking for a fun trend to affix to the fall season, the proliferation of geeks in primetime television is where you’ll look. If you’re looking for something arcane yet sexy, you’ll talk about the huge influx of foreign-born stars playing American characters in the new shows.

But if you want to bum people out by sounding an alarm bell that probably needs to be rung, viewer attrition is your Fall-TV 2007 trend.

Only a handful of returning shows met or exceeded their premiere ratings from last season. Many have lost huge chunks of their fan base from last year. Last night, “Desperate Housewives” was the highest-rated program, with nearly under 19 million viewers, but that was more than five million fewer than its debut last fall. All the other returning shows also gauged audience losses from last year.

Bringing in new series to replace the aging programs doesn’t seem to help, either: Most of the new shows introduced last week didn’t even perform as well as the cancelled series they were replacing. Only two – “Bionic Woman” and “Private Practice” – were unqualified successes, if not blockbuster hits.

In order to contend with the viewer diaspora, Mediaweek ratings guru Marc Berman has had to add a new category to his roundup of winners and losers on each night (mainly because there haven’t been many winners): “Respectable sampling.”

There’s an inspiring rallying cry for the networks: “CBS: Home to the Shows that Garner Respectable Sampling.”

Maybe that whole “We’re approaching the day when the word ‘broadcaster’ will be a quaint, antiquated relic of a TV landscape that no longer exists” in the last post wasn’t hyperbole, after all.