TVNewser was there this morning as David Muir and Elizabeth Vargas marked the new season of ABC’s iconic newsmagazine 20/20 as they took part in a ceremonial lighting of the Empire State Building. Tonight the New York City landmark will shine in blue and white in honor of the show’s 40th season.
After the lighting in the lobby, we headed up to the observatory, roughly 86 floors above 5th Avenue, to chat with Muir and Vargas, as well as 20/20 senior executive producer David Sloan. ABC News president James Goldston was also present for the celebration, as were approximately 100 tourists.
“I think both of our backgrounds as journalists out in the field lend themselves to breaking news hours that we’ve done,” said Muir, who joined Vargas on the show in 2013.
Vargas and Muir have teamed up on stories from the Paris terror attacks, to the police shooting in Dallas, to Hurricane Irma. “And then the bigger hours with the historic town hall with the Pope, as well as the opioid crisis where we followed families for more than a year,” said Muir. “I think the DNA of 20/20 is rich in that you can’t predict one genre of reporting for the year ahead. And I gather there will be a lot of breaking news and Elizabeth and I will be on top of it.”
“What you don’t often see on cable news are the kinds of stories we’re doing on 20/20 where we have an entire hour to delve into a story and tell it in an in-depth and very rich way,” said Vargas, who’s been with the show since 2004. “The viewer out there, the television news consumer has amazing options now, and it’s only a good thing that there are more options. I think the more educated we all are about what’s going on around us in the world, the better we all are.”
But the challenge for shows like 20/20 is the sheer amount of TV being produced, making it harder for appointment viewing programs like 20/20 to keep viewers and draw in new ones.
Like most broadcast news shows, 20/20 is coming off a soft 2016-2017 season. 20/20 averaged 4.04 million viewers last season and 1.379 million in the A25-54 demo, down -16 percent in viewers and down -18 percent in the demo vs. the 2015-2016 season.
Still, Sloan thinks the formula will keep 20/20’s loyal audience, along with a strong lead-in, coming back. “The program has evolved from a multi-topic, high concept show into a single topic, single narrative program that traps the viewer in a single, high-impact experience,” he said. “It’s a higher impact show because it gives viewers not only the information that they need, but new insights and new ways of thinking about a subject.”
“We’re dedicated to diving deeper and telling a story in a richer way than perhaps you might be seeing elsewhere,” said Vargas.
