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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Dear Seth,

I just wanted to drop a line and congratulate you on basically turning Sunday nights on FOX into “Seth Sundays.” I don’t think the monopolization of a network by one person has been done since Aaron Spelling dominated ABC during the 1970s and ’80s. Of course, being the king of the Animation Domination, you are subject to criticism as well as compliment. So, I’d like to give you both.

First, the compliment. I missed much of last season’s Family Guy, so I don’t know if your tribute to the SuperFriends was done already. However, since it was new to me, I’m going to give you a virtual high-five for the intro to Sunday night’s episode. I know you’ve done this before with, for instance, your little vignette featuring the Jetsons, but I haven’t seen it done in the intro. My favorite moment was replacing the Wonder Twins intro with a simple, deadpan “Meg.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Round and round and round she goes, but where Paula will land, nobody knows. Maybe she can be a zombie on AMC’s forthcoming series.

• The best news ever of the week was that AMC is working on a television adaptation of The Walking Dead. The ongoing comic series is far and away the most compelling “zombie apocalypse saga” I’ve ever seen.
• TNT announced that Saving Grace would wrap with a nine episode run in 2010, because they’re too cheap to produce a full fourth season for the monster hit.
• Comedy Central, on the other hand, yanked Reno 911 after the fact, meaning it’s done and gone.
• The Apprentice’s Omarosa is going to be a minister, and somewhere suddenly cold, Satan is chalking up another win for the home team.
• In a sign that we’ve let this reality TV crap go way too far, Kim’s sister Kourtney Kardashian’s surprise pregnancy is scandalous news.
• Paula Abdul might work on Dancing With the Stars, Ugly Betty, So You Think You Can Dance, something in Australia, a local Wendy’s, or any number of jobs. She’s keeping her options open.
• Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham helped out on American Idol during early audition rounds, and may be lobbying to join the show permanently. And with all that money they saved by not rehiring Abdul, FOX re-upped Simon Cowell for three more years.
• Apparently, the networks are burning through their ’80s and ’90s DVD collections, as now they’ve greenlit a series based on St. Elmo’s Fire. Goonies, anyone?
• Speaking of ’80s and ’90s — toy-themed cartoons proved a hit at the box office again, as G.I. Joe took the top spot at the box office, meaning that I might get my Sectaurs revival sooner than I thought … maybe?
• I refuse to mention a single thing that happened to anyone involved with the Gosselins. But if that saga isn’t train-wreck enough for you, FOX is giving airtime to Octomom.
• HOLY CRAP! STEWIE IS GAY?!?
• Oh, and now the Emmys will be live. All of it. So you’ll have to add six hours to the end of your DVR scheduled recording of it … you know, just in case.
• We get a sneak preview of the future career of Hannah Montana as little Miley Cyrus danced on a stripper pole at the Teen Choice Awards.

In some ways, I think that Father’s Day is totally more important than Mother’s Day.

This isn’t because I think fathers are more important or do more than mothers, or that I’m anti-feminist or whatever, but it’s because I feel that dads just don’t get as much recognition as mothers do. It’s probably some sort of collective psychological thing that has sociological studies behind our view of gender roles and the father’s place in his children’s life, that someone smarter than me has actual facts and knowledge can talk about.

All I know is this: dads need some love, too. And generally, they do not have a lot of places to turn to for it. My father personally has a black list of books and cartoons — The Berenstain Bears being the chief offenders, though I believe he also may have had a vendetta against The Flintstones — that portray fathers solely as bumbling idiots who were completely lost without the sanity and wisdom the mother provided. (Though he’s a big fan of Family Guy. I don’t think it’s worth figuring out.) Heaven forbid I ask him to read a Berenstain Bears book to me (okay, I could read it myself, but my dad did voices) or he would not only refuse but launch into a rant on the stereotypical role of the father and how it was corrupting my brain and wildly incorrect and blah blah blah. Which I knew, Daddy, geez. It’s just a book. It wasn’t until I started watching TV that wasn’t on PBS that I really started understanding where my dad was coming from with his whole vendetta. Read the rest of this entry »