Okay, so it wasn’t a revelation of a week, but damn if it didn’t feel like one. Finally, this season, something good to watch!

There were still a few things that were meh, don’t get me wrong. I’m really not feeling Mollee and think she’s way over her head in this competition (and I’m really not feeling that weird braid thing she does to the side of her head. What is that?). I think Karen should have gone home over Channing, who’s been in the bottom far less,  and I still miss Mia Michaels. Tyce really tried to step up to the crazy-weird plate with the Blackbird routine, but you can’t manufacture mad genius. There was no commitment to the concept, just a few bird-like movements every so often as if he suddenly remembered, “Hey, I’m doing a conceptual routine that mimics the title of the song I chose!”

But enough about my few complaints — this week was much, much better. If Season 6 keeps this up, it could actually shape up to be, well, worthwhile.

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After the dramatic entrance of V last week, there were no similar big splash stories to lead things off this week. Then, as I was perusing the year-ago numbers, something occurred to me. It’s quite possible that FOX could improve both Monday and Thursday at 9:00 if they swapped Fringe and Lie To Me. If you look back to the initial Fringe run, it had a lot of success following House. In fact, while the House numbers are virtually unchanged from Tuesday to Monday, Fringe was holding much more of the House audience on Tuesday than Lie To Me currently is on Monday.

Example:
11/18/08: House (13.03m/5.5), Fringe (9.36m/4.2)
11/09/09: House (13.31m/5.3), Lie To Me (7.41m/3)

And that was against very similar competition. Both faced DWTS on ABC, which was pretty much a wash. NBC was greatly improved against Fringe with Biggest Loser (7.84m/3.3), as opposed to Trauma (5.35m/1.8). And CBS was mixed, with The Mentalist (15.83m/3.5) trailing the Men/Big Bang hour (13.62m/4.6) in the demo.

Now we look at where we are this season. Fringe did manage something of a rebound this week, finishing with (5.91m/2.2) on Thursday. That’s still a distant fourth place, and should find the show on the hot seat at the end of the season. It would, obviously, do better on Monday following House. The question is, would it do better than the (7.41m/3) that Lie To Me is currently offering? I think it would.

On the other side of that coin, while I’m not quite as confident about the move of Lie To Me to Thursday, I do still see the potential for it to outperform the current Fringe numbers. That bar has been set, after all, rather low. It would likely take a  hit in the move, but the end result would be that Thursday at 9:00 is stronger as well. Just something to think about. The usual numbers junk is after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Call the pairing of Nathan and Mollee whatever you want, but I will call them out for what they’ve been — lucky. They’re very lucky America is stupid.

While Nigel was maybe too harsh on Nathan for the wrong reasons (using the words “hot” and “cool” are not signs of immaturity), both he and Mollee were by far the worst of this week. So far they’ve been lucky enough to get good dances in popular categories like Bollywood. In fact, I’d argue that they also lucked out as far as this week went — Latin ballroom is usually a universal crowd-pleaser. It’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s sexy, unlike, say, slow waltz or contemporary. If Mollee and Nathan don’t have the maturity to handle  this, how are they supposed to handle the rest of the competition?

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The World Series was the big ratings winner last week, but with New York involved, everyone kind of expected that, right? What nobody expected — most notably ABC — was the success of the V premiere. The numbers weren’t just good. It was the highest rated scripted program on the network, topping the Housewives and Grey’s. Even better, the V demo rating was the highest for a scripted show on any of the networks.  Someone at ABC has to be kicking themselves for only ordering four episodes of V, while they continue to crank out more Hanks than they know what to do with. Read the rest of this entry »

A combination of baseball and pre-sweeps repeats made for a bit of an odd week. Repeats don’t mean there aren’t numbers of note however. We had Jay Leno’s first shot against CSI: Miami and NY repeats, and a look at what running repeats on Friday does for FOX. That is, nothing good for Dollhouse season 3. Also interesting this week — The Mentalist finally topped CSI in viewers and the demo, and even a repeat Gibbs appearance is worth 16 million viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s going on with you, So You Think You Can Dance?  I’m willing to put up with you, and your eight billion weeks of auditions, and your strange scheduling (a showcase followed by two shows in one? What is this tomfoolery?), and your flat (if well-done) dances, but this is only because I love you. If I didn’t love you, I would not be dealing with your shenanigans.

It seems to me So You Think You Can Dance can only handle one big spectacular per week, and when they stretch themselves too thin, the quality severely suffers. I understand the difficulty involved in scheduling around the World Series, but this is just ridiculously confusing. If I had my way, I think that they should have done the introductory show (having that was a good idea, and a way to catch up everyone like me who couldn’t bear to sit through two months of auditions) and waited until after the World Series to resume regular scheduling instead of having this nonsense where the judges decide for us. What was even the point of that? Aren’t we supposed to have a say? Color me confused and unimpressed by these stunts.

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We do often get caught up in the big numbers from the big networks. It is, after all, hard to overlook the fact that NCIS is still growing its audience in the 7th season. There are still some very interesting stories happening on the little network, CW. When it was announced that Vampire Diaries would be paired with Supernatural, while Smallville was shuffled off to Friday, many people expected that was the end.

The show wouldn’t be able to come back from a year grinding away on Friday nights. After a few weeks looking at the numbers though, that’s not the case at all. Clark and the gang can celebrate good times, despite taking a hit from the move. In fact, this week Smallville topped new episodes of One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, 90210, and Melrose Place. It’s far from done. Elsewhere, we had our first sizable crop of repeats this week, which brought some interesting results. Read the rest of this entry »