Weird to see J.B. Smoove, here as Norman Jessup, playing something other than the buddy on a comedy series. In fact, it was really weird to see him on Castle only 24 hours after watching his Leon Black pretending to be a Jewish accountant in order to allay Michael Richards’ fears of Grote’s disease, on Curb.

He was okay, but Smoove isn’t really so much of a shining actor. Then again, he and Castle bantered excellently, so the turn had more pluses than minuses … wait a second; is Smoove in line for another sidekick role here?

I doubt it, since that’s Castle’s role on the show, at least as far as Beckett goes. But it would be funny for Castle to call up Jessup somewhere down the line when he’s stuck on a book. After all, he is a “wordsmith.” Read the rest of this entry »

Or, put another way, is there only so much funny out there in TV land that if another success story shows up, or something already on the air gets better, everything else is destined to get worse?

Maybe it’s that as individual viewers we’re only allotted so much laughing in a week. I don’t know which is the case … all I know is that, week in and week out, some of my favorite sitcoms are consistently falling flat. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Actually, the episode wasn’t so awesome. It was solid. Another interesting case for the team, and another chance for Castle to prove his worth. Captain Montgomery even had a little more to do this week. With that line though, and particularly the delivery of it, I realized exactly what it is that keeps me coming back week after week. As great as Beckett and the rest of the team are, it really is all about Castle. 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 »

After last week’s Halloween extravaganza, this week Castle took a turn for the musical with “Famous Last Words.” What it lacked in flashback costuming shenanigans, it made up for with a very clever plot that let the Castle family take the lead in the crime solving. Castle has always been helpful to Beckett and her team (mostly), but this is the first time that the team got it completely wrong. And with an assist from Alexis, Castle saved the day. 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 »