Heroes – Mohinder!!!
Well, it’s been a long time coming, but Mohinder finally returned to the action on Heroes this week. I have to say that it was slightly anticlimactic, but we did end up learning a lot more about Samuel, his powers, and his motivations through Dr. Suresh’s reappearance. This season is finally starting to take shape. The November sweeps are working their magic and the steam engine of a plot is finally starting to get rolling.
Ratings Clack – Should FOX switch Fringe and Lie To Me?
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 »
HRG and Claire are still the core of Heroes
My favorite episode of Heroes is the season one classic, “Company Man.” At that point, we’ve still got no idea who Noah Bennet was. Hell, we didn’t even know his first name. All we knew was that he had a daughter (whole family, really) and a job that were incredibly hard to reconcile on any given day. What we did know is that HRG would walk through fire for his daughter, and what we learned is that she would walk through fire for him, too. They proved early on that their relationship was central to how this show would evolve over the years, and this week’s episode proved that that is still the case.
Ratings Clack – V gets off to a great start
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 »
Heroes – Hiro and Charlie forever
I know what you’re thinking when you look at that picture, and no, this isn’t a post about Glee. Instead, Jayma Mays reprised her role of Charlie on this week’s Heroes. Now, this wouldn’t really be a big deal, except that Mays is now a regular on Glee, which appears on FOX. It’s always a tad unusual when actors travel between networks. Heck, it was only last year when NBC wouldn’t allow some of their own actors (including Masi Oka) return for the finale of Scrubs. I never thought I would be giving FOX props for doing the right thing, but they certainly made NBC look small and petty with this move.
The question is: did the guest appearance amount to anything? I think it did.
Ratings Clack – The Mentalist knocks off CSI
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 »
Heroes – Things are starting to align
I don’t want to say that this episode of Heroes was boring, because it wasn’t. For the most part I was entertained through the whole hour. With that being said, however, it seemed like the events of this episode were more of a “mean” than an “end.” I think that this installment was setting up and positioning characters for the rest of the season. Frankly, I’m more curious about where everything is headed than I was about anything that actually happened this week.
Most Commented (Past Week)