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 »

That’s more like it. “Time” certainly had its share of points you can quibble about, but it still managed to be my favorite episode of the young Stargate Universe season. Kicking things off with the crew exiting the stargate onto a jungle planet was a great start. We need a little more adventure here. Add in some nasty aliens, some nice character moments, and a save-the-day twist that was rather interesting and you have the makings of a pretty good episode. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Stargate: Universe came out of nowhere for me. Despite being a big Sci-Fi geek, I was never a fan of the previous iterations, be it the movie, or the two other television shows. I’m not saying they weren’t good, because I know they all had a very passionate fan base. Regardless, I’m loving SG:U so far; despite how others feel like it’s been very hit or miss, I’m totally on board.

The one aspect of the show that I really don’t like (or, at least the one aspect not named Rush that I really don’t like) was the communication stones that were heavily featured this week. I liken this show to what Star Trek: Voyager should have been, much more so than Battlestar Galatica that, with which it shares quite a bit tonally, has less in common with than is given credit for. What SG:U doesn’t share with both of the shows, that it should, is the sense of isolation.

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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 »

Seeing episodes that ring a few bells is nothing new for fans of the Stargate series. You do 300 episodes of anything, and that’s going to happen. But you don’t usually see things pop up again so quickly. Half of “Water” just fell flat for me for that very reason. It was just far too soon for an episode so similar to “Air Part 3.” On the positive side, the other half of the episode was much more interesting. The team is still dealing with how to survive, more than anything, but the sand entity put an interesting twist on that, and gave TJ a chance to shine. Read the rest of this entry »

The teaser of this week’s Lie to Me ended with the main character, Cal Lightman, seemingly shot dead. There’s been a buzz since the airing that, because there was never any doubt that by the time the end credits rolled the human lie detector would be back on his feet, the drama was all manufactured and, well, empty. Show runner Shawn Ryan has been fielding questions to that point on Twitter. The same sentiment can be found in the comments on Brett’s SG:U post. It begs the question: can television shows ever put their heroes in any realistic danger?

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