I don’t know who I felt worse for — Bailey, or the rest of Meredith and Derek’s guests, seated in painful silence around the Christmas dinner table … but we’ve all been there. If there’s one thing last night’s episode brought to mind, it’s the awkward family moments that come inexorably with the holidays.
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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 »

Who doesn’t love a good, old-fashioned showdown? Today we pit Private Practice against Grey’s Anatomy in an epic Battle of the Medical Soap Operas Sprung from Shonda Rhimes’ Dark and Twisty Mind. I’ll compare three aspects of the shows. Your votes will decide which one is better.

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This week’s episode of Grey’s saw the return of both Meredith and Izzie. Not that Meredith actually went anywhere, but her return to work. Where the show’s namesake had her quasi-absence explained away by a medical procedure, Izzie just kind of disappeared. I don’t care how you, me, or Izzie tries to spin things … her leaving her friends and her husband with no contact was just a plain crappy thing to do.

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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 »

I’ve talked often this season about how Callie Torres has really filled out as an amazing character (a lot of which had to do with the killer performances by Sara Ramirez). Much of it, however, is rooted in her relationship with Arizona Robbins. While they’ve not been together a full season yet, they’re quickly becoming my favorite couple on television. These are some of the reasons, just in this week’s episode, that you can see why:

1. 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 »