FlashForward is one of the more interesting shows of the new season where ratings are concerned. On the one hand, so far it has been a huge upgrade for the 8-9 spot on ABC. And while it has been surpassed by Survivor, it does continue to hold off Bones in the demo. On the other hand, the ratings don’t seem to be settled yet, which makes each week a new adventure. This week, the yo-yo headed back up. What will next week bring? One can only guess. I continue to think that it will eventually be passed up by the fiercely loyal Bones audience at some point, finding its place as the number 3 show in the hour. Elsewhere this week, there was good news for Dancing With The Stars, NCIS, Law & Order, So You Think You Can Dance, and Smallville. The news wasn’t so good for Hank, Parks & Recreation, Three Rivers, or Melrose Place.

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Elizabeth’s back, sharing her ideas about Fringe this time, after musing on the musical TV shows and Glee’s success so far.

So now we’ve spent all summer shocked, amazed and desperate to know just why William Bell wanted to talk to Olivia in the still-existing World Trade Center. And … they waited another two and a half episodes to show us. It’s a strange cliffhanger, to be sure, being drawn out like that, but now at least she’s finally remembered her conversation with Bell, and the shapeshifting-soldier plot is moving forward — not to mention poor Charlie Francis is off the show for sure now. As character sendoffs go, it’s a pretty good one — both important to the plot and emotionally effective. He even gets Olivia to mourn him. At least he got one last chance to do something other than give exposition and act baffled.

Speaking of characters getting to do something more, Peter’s stepped up to take more of a leadership role while Olivia was out of circulation, which is a big step for his character but a welcome one. For now he’s gone back to helping out Olivia and making excuses for his father, so we’ll see what happens later on — especially if he finds out he’s not the “real” Peter, as that Rebecca woman Walter also used to experiment on saw without realizing. Now that he’s starting to have dreams that might be memories of having been taken by this world’s Walter, this new assertiveness of Peter’s could start causing trouble for everybody.

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It was a strange week for ratings. Brett Favre playing against Green Bay made for a huge Monday Night Football (21.84m/9) audience on ESPN. And then the baseball playoffs ran through the rest of the week, calling a lot of the seemingly odd drops in viewers into question. Despite that increased competition, there was some good news to be had. The Biggest Loser, Bones, The Office, Lie To Me, Castle, and The Simpsons all managed to make gains week-to-week. Dollhouse also got in the game, stopping a four episode streak of series lows. On the other side, it’s starting to look like ER took all of it’s viewers with it when it left. The premiere numbers for Three Rivers were not good, and NBC’s dueling medical dramas continue to struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed that we’ve had a few chat / live-blog posts here the past few weeks. We call them both a “chat” and a “live-blog” because the system we use, CoverItLive, is more of a live-blogging platform than a chat interface, but so far it’s worked very well for us.

The attendance for these chats have been hit or miss, so we’d like to get some feedback from you, the readers, as to what shows you’d like to see us post chats for. We can’t promise anything, but it helps us figure out where to concentrate our energies.

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Week two of the full-tilt-boogie season brought with it some interesting things, including premieres for Animation Domination, The Amazing Race, Trauma, Hank, and The Middle. We also saw more huge numbers from House, NCIS, and Grey’s. But after all of that, the most interesting story again comes from the show with the worst ratings on all of the big four networks, Dollhouse. After season two premiered to a series low last week, things got even worse. Episode two just barely cleared the 2 million viewer bar, while falling below a 1 in the demo. Reached for comment, my BFF Jill said, “OMG! RLY!?”

Yes, really. The situation is dire. Even the hardcore Whedonites are now at DEFCON 1. Someone has got word that the show could be in danger of being pulled from the air. I don’t know anything more than they do about that, but I would expect it to get one more shot this Friday, before baseball takes over. If episode three doesn’t show some sort of improvement though, I wouldn’t be surprised if baseball makes way for a series of House and Bones repeats on Fridays at 9. Read the rest of this entry »

While we continue waiting for Agent Dunham to hurry up and remember what happened in that alternative universe, we get another “monster of the week” story to tide us over. I kind of like Dunham better as a freak in her own right than as the regular lead of the show.

In fact, has anyone else noticed that Peter is basically the lead now? He stepped up in the season premiere, demanding a more pro-active stance on these fringe incidents. Now, with Olivia recovering, he’s essentially leading all their moves and determining their next best move. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy smokes. After a summer without a lot of numbers to really be excited about, last week was just stuffed to the gills. There were season and series premieres everywhere, bringing in ratings that ran the gamut from outstanding to horrible. The big winners were House, NCIS, and Grey’s Anatomy. On the other end of the scale? The Beautiful Life, Brothers, Dollhouse, and just about all of NBC. Read the rest of this entry »