I think this episode is the gem I’ve been eagerly anticipating all season on The Big Bang Theory. Mind you, I’ve been enjoying the series all along. But it somehow had lost some of its chuckles for me. It’s been a bit lackluster. It’s been storylines which simply don’t rock my world.  While tonight’s main plots have been seen before it sitcoms, the Sheldon Factor in all of its glory shined.

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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 »

I’ll take “people we got an earful from this week” for two hundred!

I was going back and forth through the quotes submitted by our writers this week, and I couldn’t quite understand why the haul seemed so light. Then it dawned on me: ABC didn’t air its new Wednesday night comedy lineup this week. Can you believe how quickly those three shows (sorry Hank!) have entered our pop-culture? Yowza.

30 Rock

“Alright hosers: I want all 12 of us fighting for every meter on all three downs. And we’re gonna make this a Boxing Day the Prime Minister will never forget.” – Danny, in his Canadian football movie

“I feel about as useless as a mom’s college degree.” – Kenneth, on his problem with Danny Read the rest of this entry »

Yep, if I have to put up with Leonard and Penny bed scenes, I’m going to make you all suffer with me. I’m still not seeing any boyfriend/girlfriend chemistry between them. They share no interests. As a matter of fact, their interests, their minds, their lifestyles — they’re all so far apart that, if this were real life, they’d have nothing to say to each other. I will continue to suspend my disbelief. At least their relationship gave us a good Sheldon episode tonight.

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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 guess I don’t mind Penny and Leonard being a couple — as bizarre as the concept may be — if I don’t have to watch bed scenes with them. I can only suspend my disbelief to a certain point. That point doesn’t include the thought of those two having sex. It just doesn’t. Thankfully we had no bedroom scenes tonight.

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We do often get caught up in the big numbers from the big networks. It is, after all, hard to overlook the fact that NCIS is still growing its audience in the 7th season. There are still some very interesting stories happening on the little network, CW. When it was announced that Vampire Diaries would be paired with Supernatural, while Smallville was shuffled off to Friday, many people expected that was the end.

The show wouldn’t be able to come back from a year grinding away on Friday nights. After a few weeks looking at the numbers though, that’s not the case at all. Clark and the gang can celebrate good times, despite taking a hit from the move. In fact, this week Smallville topped new episodes of One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, 90210, and Melrose Place. It’s far from done. Elsewhere, we had our first sizable crop of repeats this week, which brought some interesting results. Read the rest of this entry »