A new year in Sentai means a new team, a new story, and sometimes a radical departure from last year’s approach. It also means a renewed interest in ratings, to see how the new show is doing compared to the last one, and the inevitable debates about what the ratings really mean and if they really matter at all. Go-Busters’ ratings in particular have driven a lot of discussion on the forums, so let’s go point by point through what’s true, what’s false, and how much a fan really ought to care about this sort of thing.

1. Go-Busters has the worst ratings in Sentai history. This is true. Go-Busters is on track to have the overall lowest series average to date for the franchise. The show is trending toward a 4.3% average, with its highest episode to date scoring a 5.2% and the lowest scoring a 3.2%. For comparison, the previous lowest-rated series in the franchise was Ohranger, which pulled a 4.5% average.  It’s not completely impossible for the ratings to improve later in Go-Busters’s run, though. The past few weeks have consistently posted higher numbers than the first few. That said, most Sentai shows debut high and then either hold steady or enter a period of decline. Good word of mouth, like the sort enjoyed by Jetman, tends not to translate into any sort of big effect on the ratings. We’ll get into why a bit later.

2. The ratings aren’t really that low, it’s just that ratings for all Japanese shows are declining these days. This is mostly false. The problem with this argument is that, overall, average mainstream audience share for Japanese TV hasn’t declined significantly over the past few decades. A lot of the things that dragged down American TV ratings during this period haven’t impacted Japanese ratings to the same degree (or at all, in some cases).

Here’s an example. The long-running Japanese animated sitcom Sazae-san usually pulls around a 20% rating when a new episode airs. We picked Sazae-san simply because its ratings tend to be very stable, and indicative of overall trends. So, about ten years ago, its average rating was still around 20%. If you go back twenty years, you can see a small jump upward, with Sazae-san pulling a 24.5% average rating. In short, while Japanese ratings used to be a little bit higher, but not that much higher. If Japanese ratings were really in general decline, a show like Sazae-san would be one of the first to show the effects.

Let’s compare Go-Busters to how Sentai was doing in 1992. This was the year of Zyuranger, which pulled an average rating of 7.1%. Higher than Go-Busters, sure, but not really out of its league. Ten years ago, Hurricanger pulled a similar 7.5% average. From a simple look at these numbers you can conclude that Super Sentai has probably fallen into a period of ratings decline, and not one being generally mirrored by other shows.

3. The ratings are bad because Japanese fans hate Go-Busters. This is kind of false. The “kind of” is because there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that Japanese Sentai nerds aren’t too happy with Go-Busters. That said, the way the Japanese Internet fans feel is rarely of any long-term importance to a franchise like Sentai. This is due to the influence demographics have on the ratings averages.

The ratings figures I tossed out above are strict averages, factoring in viewership from all possible demographics. If you break viewership down by category, then it becomes clear who tunes in for Sentai on TV in Japan. Overwhelmingly, it’s children. While most Sentai shows now have single-digit ratings, their audience share with kids usually ranges from 10% to 15%. Other groups usually watch in far smaller numbers, usually 3% at most and sometimes in numbers as low as 0.1%. Gokaiger could sometimes pull 5% or 6% share with certain adult demographics, but numbers like that for Sentai are extremely rare.

Because kids are by far the biggest chunk of Sentai’s audience, Japanese fan consensus probably has very little to do with Go-Busters’ ratings. If Go-Busters’s numbers are low, it’s probably due to kids choosing not to tune in to the program. Kids tend not to post online about what they think, so right now we can’t be sure how Japanese kids feel about Go-Busters. There may just be something on another channel in the same time slot that’s more popular sometimes.

4. The ratings don’t matter anyway, it’s all about the toy sales. This is mostly false. To discuss why, we need to talk about Ohranger again. While Ohranger held the record for lowest average ratings in Sentai prior to Go-Busters, it also held (and still holds) the franchise’s all-time record for highest toy sales. The popularity of Ohranger’s toys simply didn’t translate into high ratings. In a situation like this, it means the toy company enjoyed the lion’s share of the property’s success, while the TV network was left holding the bag.

Ohranger was the next-to-last series to run in Sentai’s “old” time slot, which was at roughly 5:30 in the evening. At that point in time, Sentai was a general audience show that families were expected to watch together. Right now Sentai runs at the equivalent of 7:30 AM slot, so it’s effectively a morning cartoon that kids are likely to watch alone. At best, you might have parents let it run in the background during breakfast.

Ohranger’s successor, Carranger, had a 4.8% average rating. Its toy sales were robust, though not stratospheric the way Ohranger’s were. Carranger is the last show to run in the 5:30 PM slot in its entirety. Around its eighth episode, Carranger’s successor Megaranger moved into Sentai’s current 7:30 AM timeslot. Megaranger saw a marked improvement in its overall ratings after the move. This time slot change was clearly not about the toy sales at all, but about pleasing the network.

5. Since the ratings are bad, Toei is going to change Go-Busters. This is probably false. Toei typically only retools a show when the toy sales are bad. Goseiger, for instance, gets retooled shortly after its halfway point with a production staff change and a  fairly noticeable change in tone. The openly cited reason, at the time, was poor toy sales for the show’s first couple of quarters. Goseiger’s overall toy sales end up not much worse than Shinkenger’s, so the retooling clearly worked.

Toei’s usual approach to a show with healthy toy sales but sagging ratings is to retool its successor, based on what Toei thinks the audience might want. So Carranger, for instance, was allowed to finish as a satirical comedy, but then Megaranger put more of an emphasis on straight-faced power fantasy and action. The ratings improve dramatically, because Megaranger was just more along the lines of what kids wanted to see.

Finally, it’s worth noting that since Sentai is the lead-in to Kamen Rider these days, Kamen Rider’s overall ratings tend to have a pretty big influence on Sentai’s numbers. A show that runs against a highly-rated Kamen Rider series tends to get a noticeable ratings bump out of it. Go-Busters is running as the lead-in to Kamen Rider Fourze, which is currently on track to be the lowest-rated series in the Kamen Rider franchise. That’s something Toei is likely to take into consideration when looking at Go-Busters’s performance.

6. Since the ratings are bad, TV Asahi is going to cancel Sentai. This is probably false.  When you’re dealing with Japanese shows for kids, cancellation territory tends to be much lower than the numbers Go-Busters is currently pulling. Digimon Xros Wars aired earlier in the same block as Sentai, for instance, and had to pull average ratings below a 1% for several weeks before there was any inkling that the plug might be pulled. Go-Busters just isn’t in that kind of trouble.

Now, if the current trend of decline continued over the course of the next three or four years, then it’s possible we could see Sentai in cancellation territory. Toei will do everything in its power to prevent that from happening, though. When a show runs for over 35 years non-stop, nobody wants to be the guy responsible for getting it axed. What is probably more likely is that if ratings kept drifting downward, Sentai might find itself moved to another new timeslot.