Did DS9 falter ratings-wise due to a strange concept?
- Thread starter indolover
- Start date
Actually, in Chicago it was something like 5PM Saturdays, then 4PM after Earth: Final Conflict premiered. It only aired earlier Saturday if baseball was pre-empting its normal timeslot. And at a 5PM timeslot, that made it far less vulnerable than the 2PM (Sinbad, Xena) or 3PM (Hercules) shows.
Not sure about Season 3 on back, but these were the time slot changes for Seasons 4-7:
Season 4 managed to entirely avoid any premiering episodes being pre-empted.
* "Children of Time"- aired Tuesday night 7PM, just 3 days after "Soldiers of the Empire". Paired up with an episode of The Adventures of Sinbad (the 2PM Saturday series).
* "In the Cards"- aired Sunday 11AM
* "Wrongs Darker than Death or Night"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "In the Pale Moonlight"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "The Reckoning"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "Valiant"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "Strange Bedfellows"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "The Changing Face of Evil"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "Tacking Into the Wind"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM
* "The Dogs of War"- aired Sunday 4 or 5PM (real smart move scheduling this episode for Memorial Day weekend on Paramount's part. No wonder it was the lowest rated episode of the series)
[no 2PM Saturday airdates... unless it was a rerun]
Of course, DS9's series finale was divided into 2 parts and aired in the usual Saturday timeslot whereas 2 years later, Xena's series finale was aired as a special Saturday night 7-9PM. WPWR-50 aired "All Good Things..." Tuesday 7-9PM instead of the usual timeslot, and re-aired "Encounter at Farpoint" Monday 7-9PM.
That's 10 episodes out of 104 episodes or 9.6%; 1 in every 10 1/2 episodes on average. And most of the time, DS9 got its timeslot just on the Sunday after it should have aired. Hercules & Xena were usually bumped to Saturday at noon or 1PM or Sunday at 11AM or noon. And Chicago was lucky WGN actively ran crawls during the episode the week before saying when it would air. A bunch of affiliates never did that, meaning it was anyone's guess when it would air.
TNG did have a solid timeslot, but it did sometimes air during the week in primetime depending on the station's choice. Voyager's timeslot was far less solid that it seemed. Many UPN affiliates at the time aired sports and it was all too common for basketball and/or hockey to pre-empt Voyager on Wednesday nights. Baseball also pre-empted it in some markets as well. To most UPN affiliates, the UPN schedule was secondary to the ratings/ad revenue from a basketball or hockey or baseball game. And sometimes UPN lost its affiliation in an area. That's why Milwaukee's market had no Voyager for much of Season 4. Voyager fans who were online had to arrange a tape trade with viewers from adjacent states to get the episodes. All 14? missed episodes did eventually air as a marathon on one day when UPN affiliation returned to Wisconsin. TNG didn't have crap like that (though in some parts of Texas, high school football pre-empted it!).
I transcribed the episode ratings from the places I found 'em online. Even have a fair number of rerun ratings (have first run ratings for all series since TNG, very detailed rerun ratings for VOY & ENT, and most of DS9), but not on this computer and on another computer, they're all in an Excel file with some graphs charting the ratings for DS9 vs. other ST series or week by week vs Hercules & Xena. If I remember off the top of my head, DS9 was #1 in synd for a while, then Hercules for a time, then Xena for a solid block of 2 seasons or so. DS9 managed to reclaim #1 in its last season. And why? Hercules & Xena cooled off faster than DS9 did.
While the OP thinks DS9 & Hercules/Xena weren't direct competition because of sci-fi vs. fantasy, in a way they were. They were all syndicated shows and in the same ballpark (why Sci-Fi Channel used to show sci-fi & fantasy). They usually weren't pitted against one another, but all syndicated shows were trying to get bought and get the best timeslot. Now, these 3 usually didn't really have a war of attrition against one another because during each of their runs, they all jockeyed between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place slots for first-run syndication of non-game/judge/talk shows. This really affected lower-tier shows like Earth: Final Conflict, Viper... or was it Cobra, Conan, Nightman, and Babylon 5 as well (steadily got about 1/2 the ratings of DS9 even despite its so-called ratings surge, though to its credit, it had some of the worst timeslots imaginable and the Boston station treated it abominably [Warner Bros should have revoked the right to air it from the station, refund them for the remaining weeks in the package, and sell it at a discount to a rival station]). What really started to erode the syndication market were a few factors:
* Fall of the independent stations. There used to be many independent stations. They usually showed movies and syndicated reruns of whole series. First-run syndication was a boon to them. The seed was planted with the new success of some lackluster-rated-on-network series like Star Trek, I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch, Leave It to Beaver and it took off with Ted Knight's Too Close for Comfort going from ABC to syndication, touching off a wave of cancelled sitcoms being repackaged for first-run synd and some series going straight to syndication and with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe being a powerhouse for weekday afternoon ratings, touching off a syndicated boom in weekday and weekend/weekly cartoons. Fox gobbled up some of the ind. stations but it was WB & UPN combined which gobbled up the rest. These took all the prime timeslots. Add in sports and really, all that was left was the weekends.
(TNG showed how popular dramas could be in syndication so touched off a wave there. That's why synd. comedies were rare past the '80s. TNG was the best rated syndicated show (and drama) since Sea Hunt, and that show ended 26 years before TNG premiered! Cartoons... it was that nasty bill passed by Congress in the mid '90s, worst of both worlds- deregulated tv/radio markets to allow for mega conglomerates to gobble up everything and overregulate syndicated cartoons and impose E/I standards that effectively made it impossible to air cartoons and make a profit, a necessary evil on commercial stations. Under their criteria, Biographies of Paris Hilton aired at 3 or 4 in the morning on a weekend counted as 'educational')
* Replaced by comedy reruns. I've read complaints about this, even one fan posting an email response online to their email to the station. In the late '90s, a bunch of comedies that played much better with the advertisers (attracted better demos). Specifically: Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and even in 1 instance The Nanny. These were all shows still airing and just became available for syndication or just ended. People reported whole syndicated blocks being replaced with these shows. What did this do? Usually it pushed DS9, Hercules, Xena, even them, the top 3 shows in synd, to late night or overnight timeslots on the weekend.
* Cable. Cable slowly eroded ratings of broadcast stations over time. But I have to wonder what the composition of DS9 or any show's audience really was, i.e. how often was Sci-Fi Channel airing any real competition against whenever DS9, Hercules, Xena, etc were airing? I think cable was a tertiary drain compared to the first two.
For audiences to erode like that, either they became disinterested (ratings still went way down during DS9's Dominion War, "Seven of Tits" or "Tits of Nine" as she was called by DS9 Voyager-haters didn't boost the ratings, "Scorpion"/Borg did. Past that bump, Voyager's ratings returned to their normal downward slope. She showed no boosting effect on Season 4) or they were never fans/loyal viewers, just captive viewers (nothing else on, mildly interested enough to tune in every week if not doing something).
And to encapsulate a previous thread on DS9's ratings:
- DS9 was not lower rated than Voyager. Week by week and season by season, DS9 beat Voyager except for the first handful of Voyager eps and a rare VOY ep here or there.
- So-called favoritism in advertising was actually due to syndication vs. network. Voyager had a network to advertise for it (though it was usually just on UPN), DS9 had whole blocks generally locked up due to DS9 airing on WB/UPN affiliates. I'm not sure I ever saw a DS9 ad during WB programming (Chicago's DS9 affiliate was a WB affiliate), only during non-WB programming.
- I think it's been realized TNG was special. It wasn't the baseline Trek audience, it attracted a much larger audience. There have been mentions of people whose dads or uncles were cops and who watched TNG and they weren't sci-fi fans. It was Stewart's character/acting and the writing, tone, and kinds of plots TNG had that drew in a lot of viewers who might not regularly watch sci-fi.
You can see below by the averages listed. I'll put the top few in synd in parentheses. Voyager wasn't in synd, B5 was for all intents & purposes but sort of wasn't (the non-entity known as PTEN)
And here are the season averages for all the new eps in a given season. Only have 1 full season of data for B5, which counts all eps aired from 9/96- 6/97 as that season even though B5's airing schedule was screwy. I mention Nowhere Man, The Sentinel, 7 Days for comparison because they were Voyager's companion shows (except Sentinel S1 & S4, which are noted for completion sake). Voyager was the #1 rated show on UPN until wrestling came.
This is rating, not share data.
Season- Shows
93-94- TNG 12.12, DS9 8.76
For comparison: X-Files 7.1
(don't have TNG S1-6 readily available)
94-95- VOY 8.00, DS9 7.67 (#1), Hercules 5.78* (#??). Have many gaps this season, but Baywatch was reliably in the 2nd spot in spring. Each week from Jan-Aug, with 7 weeks with no data, Baywatch led just 2 weeks. Hercules usually bumped Renegade out of 3rd place. Highlander... it had really low ratings during its entire run. Not sure why a dude with a samurai sword and a rock anthem theme song didn't attract more viewers but I think it's that rare case where foreign ratings actually kept the show on the air (US/Canada/France production) (*: missing 5 ep ratings for HTLJ Season 1)
For comparison: X-Files 9.7
95-96- DS9 6.61 (#1), Hercules 5.84 (#2), VOY 5.68, Xena 5.29 (#3). Baywatch stays in 4th place from here on out. Best finish this season was 2nd spot *one* week. Strange fact: Hercules & Xena reruns fared far better in summertime than DS9 reruns even in spite of DS9 finishing #1 most weeks of the regular season, in the summer, it was Hercules 1st, Xena 2nd, DS9 3rd. Who said DS9's viewers were nerds who stayed in summers because they had few friends/no outside life? When Herc & Xena's ratings deflated, their reruns look more in line with DS9's. Voyager's summer rerun ratings did the same... completely tank.
For comparison: X-Files 10.6, Nowhere Man 3.05, Sentinel 2.72
96-97- Xena 6.18 (#1), Hercules 5.81 (#2), DS9 5.76 (#3), VOY 4.78, B5 3.38. After the week of 1/6/97, Xena takes over and until the Oct 1998, DS9 takes the #1 spot just 5 weeks! (9/15/97, 11/10/97, 3/30/98, 4/6/98, 5/18/98; 4 gaps in summer 98). For almost that entire time, it's a solid block of Xena finishing 1st. Hercules did a little better; it led 10 weeks in that span of time.
For comparison: X-Files 11.9, Buffy 2.49, Sentinel 3.48
97-98- Xena 5.65 (#1), Hercules 5.20 (#2), DS9 4.96 (#3), VOY 4.31. Earth: Final Conflict looks like, after its premiere at 4.9 in #3, it never finishes better than 4th. Don't have solid enough ratings for E:FC during its run to have a tally of it. The 4 holdover eps of B5 in Oct 1997 averaged 2.08. Don't have info on B5 on TNT.
For comparison: X-Files 12.1, Buffy 3.83, Sentinel 2.79
98-99- DS9 4.40 (#1), Xena 4.09 (#2), Hercules 4.03 (#3), VOY 3.66. SG-1 was reliably 4th, pushing E:FC to 5th. Crusade was 1.28. Voyager reruns those 13 weeks that summer: 1.94. Ouch. When new episodes in a slow summer get just 66% of Voyager reruns... ouch.
For comparison: X-Files 10.2, Buffy 4.15, 7 Days 2.52, Sentinel 1.54, Futurama 6.70
99-00- Xena 3.60 (#1), VOY 3.56, Hercules 3.33 (#2*). Xena dominates, but SG-1 really starts to break its dominance in Feb & May 2000. Don't have SG-1's full tally but it looks like Xena had an edge enough weeks to hold the #1 spot despite losing 2 of the 3 sweeps periods to SG-1.
*: Hercules was 3.33 for its final half season. In that same period, SG-1 was 3.20. Even with a few missing numbers, SG-1's new Feb-May eps are so high, it would average more than Hercules. Cleopatra 2525/Jack of All Trades (replacement package for Hercules)... yeah, it was low rated, distant 3rd, often just beating Earth: Final Conflict for the small block I have for each shows' ratings that season.
For comparison: X-Files 8.6, Buffy 3.55, 7 Days 2.29, Futurama 5.48
00-01- VOY 3.42, Xena 3.29. Don't have Andromeda's season data so don't know if it was #1 or #2.
For comparison: X-Files 8.15, Buffy 3.39, 7 Days 1.90, Futurama 4.43
01-02- ENT 4.0. Earth: Final Conflict, missing some eps, have a pretty good set, ranged from 1.6~2.4 (mostly over 2.0 in Fall, under 2.0 in Winter/Spring)
For comparison: X-Files 5.54, Buffy 3.38, Futurama 3.58
02-03- ENT 2.9
For comparison: Buffy 2.69, Futurama 2.86
03-04- ENT 2.5 (Xindi Arc made the season have the lowest ratings decline of any Star Trek season since TNG. Audience was 2.6 or higher most weeks from "The Xindi" thru "Azati Prime" (lower for "Exile", "The Shipment", "Carpenter Street", "Proving Ground", "Hatchery") but that 2 month hiatus in spring really torpedoed the show, hovering 2.2-2.4 all weeks except "Damage" (2.0. Some of the audience had no clue when the reruns would end) & "Zero Hour" (2.7).
04-05- ENT 1.9
During the 95-96 thru 98-99 seasons, Voyager averaged 83~87% of DS9's ratings that season. The 1 whole season of B5 data I have (Season 4, their 'best' season in terms of fandom. Only have a handful of eps from earlier seasons, which were higher rated but always on the cancellation bubble for that year), B5 averaged 59% of DS9's ratings that season.
Other facts:
Highest/Lowest rated DS9 eps each season:
S1- Emissary Part 1 & 2 (series highest)/ In the Hands of the Prophets
S2- The Homecoming & Melora (tie)/ The Collaborator (Memorial Day weekend)
S3- The Search Part I & Defiant (tie)/ Facets
S4- The Way of the Warrior Part 1 & 2/ Body Parts
S5- Trials and Tribble-ations/ The Assignment
S6- You are Cordially Invited/ The Sound of Her Voice & Tears of the Prophets (tie)
S7- What You Leave Behind Part I & II/ The Dogs of War (series lowest; Memorial Day weekend)
Just 2 eps had their rerun beat their premiere rating: Nor the Battle to the Strong & The Assignment. By contrast Xena had 12 episodes do that & Hercules had 8 episodes do that. Voyager had just 1- "Juggernaut" (no surprise why either).
All instances of Voyager beating DS9:
(this is week by week, not running eps 1-26 per season vs. eps 1-26)
* New VOY vs. DS9 rerun
Caretaker, Parallax, Prime Factors, The 37's, Initiations, Projectins, Elogium, Non Sequitur, Prototype, Deadlock, Basics Part II, Flashback, Scorpion Part II, The Gift, Nemesis, Nothing Human, Thirty Days, Bride of Chaotica!. Also possibly Sacred Ground (no hard number for The Assignment other than under 4.8)
(and Emanations tied the DS9 rerun)
* New VOY vs. new DS9
Time and Again, Phage, Eye of the Needle, Ex Post Facto, Scorpion, Dark Frontier I/II
* VOY rerun vs. new DS9 or DS9 rerun
none!
*sigh* I hate being a topic ender. Data overload I guess...
I had more or less the same experience except it was on Thursday night and basketball. What's worse is they never announced when the rebroadcast would be, but it was usually like 3am-ish Sunday morning.
I don't understand why they never reworked the contract after season 2 and just put the damn show on UPN before/after Voyager.
It would have made a ton of sense and only helped both shows.
I love all the data! It's just a lot to process. Where are you drawing all this information from? Trade papers?
DeepSpaceWine, thanks a ton for posting all that!
Yes, they do bear that out.
The point he made is that a lot of people watched the pilot and didn't keep watching the series afterward because they thought it was boring. The facts support that theory. Though a post-pilot drop is pretty normal.
Well people had just watched 6 seasons of TNG, maybe they just were trekked out and that was enough for them.
And did it drop immediately after the Pilot? I recall reading earlier in the thread, it didn't start dropping until S3, when TNG ended. Though, IMHO, although I enjoy more season 1 and 2 then most folks seem to, S3 is where it really found it's footing and started becoming something really, really special
I swear I remembered having to set my VCR to 2pm Saturdays on WGN Channel 9 back in those days, but I don't have any data to back that up, just the memory of a teenager.
Space opera doesn't depend on syndication to survive - nuBSG did very well by Skiffy standards. There's no reason why we couldn't have another show like DS9 on today, but it would need to be on cable.
If it were on HBO or Showtime, DS9 would probably be too normal and vanilla for their tastes. It would have to be something more esoteric, like a series set largely on Earth during the Eugenics Wars and the rise of Khan. I can see that getting the Game of Thrones treatment. But adventures-of-the-week on a spaceship is too expensive/nichey for broadcast and too broadcast-y for cable.
That was an early symptom of what has taken over TV in general - people wanting exactly what they want and having no patience for something that gives them 70% or 80% of what they want. Cable is training them to be like that. And frankly, DS9's pilot might have been more like 50% of what TNG fans liked about TNG, which is 99% of what I like about DS9.
If it were on HBO or Showtime, DS9 would probably be too normal and vanilla for their tastes. It would have to be something more esoteric, like a series set largely on Earth during the Eugenics Wars and the rise of Khan. I can see that getting the Game of Thrones treatment. But adventures-of-the-week on a spaceship is too expensive/nichey for broadcast and too broadcast-y for cable.
Yes, a steep drop-off. But the pilot ratings were very high, probably due to a lot of TNG fans who wanted more of the same and then the drop-off because they didn't get it.
That was an early symptom of what has taken over TV in general - people wanting exactly what they want and having no patience for something that gives them 70% or 80% of what they want. Cable is training them to be like that. And frankly, DS9's pilot might have been more like 50% of what TNG fans liked about TNG, which is 99% of what I like about DS9.
Maybe it was Saturday. I was in Chicago as well. For some reason I remembered it being on Sundays. All I know is it was some awkward time in the middle of the afternoon.
This is really interesting. Back in those days I always assumed VOY had better ratings than DS9 because (where I lived at least) it had more advertising and a better timeslot. Then I moved from Chicago to SF Bay during the 98-99 seasons and I think both VOY and DS9 were both on the local UPN network (but don't quote me on that, that was years ago and I had a boyfriend so my ST viewing habits fell off a bit
)
Yeah, it was a weird time. Had it not been for "The Great Link" (I used to live on that website) I would have never known when new episodes were airing. As it was, we always seemed to get the episode on the last day of the viewing window, so all my online buddies would already know what was going to happen up to a week before I did. And since I have never been able to pass up a spoiler, nothing was ever a surprise.
Man, I was such a nerd in High School
In San Jose/Sunnyvale, UPN was Ch44 KBHK and DS9 was paired with B5 on Wednesday nights, and Voyager was on Monday Nights, and they were all in Prime Time. I was so surprised to learn over the last 5 years or so, that the 3 shows were shown at random times throughout the Country.
This is really interesting. Back in those days I always assumed VOY had better ratings than DS9 because (where I lived at least) it had more advertising and a better timeslot. Then I moved from Chicago to SF Bay during the 98-99 seasons and I think both VOY and DS9 were both on the local UPN network (but don't quote me on that, that was years ago and I had a boyfriend so my ST viewing habits fell off a bit
Where I live (West Michigan), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired on the local Fox affiliate station (WXMI Fox 17 in Grand Rapids) on Sunday nights at 6 PM, and then during the third season they started showing each episode twice a week, starting at Friday nights at 10 PM, but the second airing in the old timeslot.
So it must've done well enough to do that.
So it must've done well enough to do that.
Sorry this is long, though usually when I explain things, I tend to go into detail.
It's whatever I could find online. Star Trek, ENT had its ratings in a few more places, though DS9 & VOY had the ratings available in a few places. Sometimes I had to piece things together from 2 sources (was Vidiot one place for VOY ratings? I think they might've been but they stopped around Season 5). A godsend was the woman who ran the Whoosh! fan site for Xena. For almost the entire 6 season run of Xena, she posted Xena's ratings and the listed ratings of its rivals, notably the top 3 or more series. This also listed a lot of Hercules episodes (hard to get that info elsewhere) and DS9. The DS9 numbers jived with the other sources except in a few places (like around Nov 1997. Perhaps the numbers were revised after they were 1st published). I was happy the numbers matched up with all but a number of times you can count on one hand. Other sites had the ratings for other series I listed (X-Files is easier to find). Millennium had one dedicated fan site with its ratings. Many B5 ratings come from someone in 96-97 who worked in the ratings industry and posted for almost every scifi/fantasy series that season and they kept tallying from Sept-May. I needed to track down B5's June 97 & Oct 1997 numbers though.
I remember many years ago my Dad being genuinely surprised after he brought me into a car parts store looking for some replacement part for his car and said "Now, it's going to be a while", saying how long it takes to find the right serial number for the part, and we ended up being out of there in 5 minutes because I was able to go through the serial number book with such speed and find the right number. He said I was evidently very good at finding things.
Part of it is knowing where to dig, a lot of it is knowing how to dig, part of it is luck.
I'm very good when it comes to records & archives once I have my bearings and following an online trail back (like where a few leaked episodes of a cartoon series that had episodes leaking far before they aired came from and how they were able to get ahold of the eps), but crap when it comes to tracking things like gossip or rumor (I was always the last to hear).
Some numbers are just hard to find (B5 numbers outside of 96-97). I'm sure they'll turn up some day; JMS probably kept them. He was very on top of things, very attuned to details in the ratings that never get published, like shifts in very specific demos & even individual markets. But alas, he's probably too prideful to publish them, still fighting that battle in his mind against all the people trying to get B5 cancelled in the '90s. The fight is history, B5 is history, it's legacy has gone up since then even if the franchise is dormant, it would be nice to have the numbers as part of the historical record. I'd love to know what the highest & lowest rated eps were for each season, see how B5 fared in Summer 94 [was said to be very strong] and how much OJ & the NBA Finals destroyed that mid June 1994 rerun. It looks like it did a number on "The Jem 'Hadar". Funny thing about that. For as big an episode as it was, its debut tied for 2nd lowest new ep rating that season, its rerun was the lowest rated episode period of the 93-94 season, so low it may not have been matched until March 1996! [have a 3 week gap in Aug 95 ratings though].
(I should add that I have the full episode schedules for everything Star Trek from Sept 1966 to May 2005. One Trek site somewhere had the old data, though SFTV was excellent for archiving the full season schedules for every season of a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy shows back to 93-94. This info was important in looking at where lows were among reruns and which reruns outperformed their premieres)
In terms of what I have in terms of Star Trek. I have one source for TNG's episode premieres, with a few annoying gaps (like "Darmok") but no rerun data. And I should add that
* DS9, I have all new eps and rerun ratings thru July 1995. From there I have 4 gaps that summer, missing 3 reruns in Season 4, 2 reruns in Season 5. There are 3 issues with DS9 episodes in Season 5. Ratings did some very weird things for Xena, Hercules, and DS9 in Oct 1996, each having some very peculiar lows, but in different weeks, and the Xena low was a highly anticipated episode ("Return of Callisto"). "The Assignment" wasn't listed, but was said to have charted under 4.8. "Blaze of Glory" simply wasn't listed (oversight?) while "Ties of Blood and Water" was noted to have not been in the top 20 (possibly another oversight). Season 6, missing 2 early reruns, then have very fragmentary records for Summer 1998 & Summer 1999. Also missing 3 reruns during Season 7.
* VOY- Everything, everything except a single week. That includes that short time it aired 2nd reruns on Tuesdays and Summer 2001 when it doubled up reruns. Only missing day, 9/12/01. Doesn't look like Nielsen was gathering/posting data then.
* ENT- Almost everything. A few times the original slot was pre-empted for the rerun but it aired in the backup timeslot on the weekend (that happened 7 times) the info is unavailable. Beyond that, the only missing number is for the 1/7/05 rerun.
X-Files also has great data. Only 3 reruns are missing data whereas everything else in the 9 year run, including reruns airing on special nights, has info.
DS9 was on Sunday evenings on WGN in Seasons 1-2. That time was usually safe from baseball (baseball loves early afternoon games on Sundays), though would have put it up against the Bulls in part of their 1st dynasty and the interregnum potentially.
I was digging up info on pre-emptions a while back, seeing where regular pre-emptions were and I've seen around a few series that SF fans seemed to be very happy with how SF series were treated there, whereas I think the NBC in SF was considered the worst in the nation for pre-emptions of scheduled programming.
You think that was bad for DS9 (or VOY)? In Chicago, fortunately DS9 still aired within the same week it premiered. Xena & Hercules aired 12-13 days after they're date of availability. If you wanted to discuss an episode, too late, everyone was talking about the next episode. Had something to do with WGN the superstation (cable) vs. WGN over-the-air (WGN Ch. 9). I'm guessing Renaissance felt its ratings might be threatened by Herc & Xena being on WGN superstation but not Paramount with DS9 being on it. Based on watching a lot of sci-fi/syndicated stuff then, everything on WGN except DS9 had the 2 week delay whereas anything syndicated on another channel (WPWR, WCIU, WFLD) aired within 1 week of the episode 'premiering' (most markets aired syndicated stuff on the weekends anyway).
You must've gotten all the airings Detroit wasn't getting. I've read the UPN in Detroit was notorious for pre-emptions. Tigers then Red Wings & Pistons. Offhand can't remember where I read DS9 aired in Detroit, but it was one of the most unstable markets for Voyager (Boston was also bad for Voyager, but infinately worse for Babylon 5).
Wasn't "Emissary" the highest-rated episode in syndication history (or since syndication's revival in the '80s)? Pilots usually spike than drop, especially for series with high name recognition (Star Trek).
Regardless of the post-pilot dropoff in audience, the numbers stayed pretty good and steady for over two years. Then the ratings got lower and lower. You can't blame that audience dropoff on the pilot.