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 »
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 »
Ghost of Halloween past: a round-up of posts
Hot damn, I love Halloween time. Deb hates it, but I freaking love it. And being that I live in New England, it’s like Halloween Central here. The fall leaves, the crisp air, and Salem a mere hour’s drive away. I have a yearly ritual of planning for a late night and early morning of TV and movie watching on Halloween night, which is why I love Rich’s regular Halloween programming posts to keep handy. It’s also part of why Deb hates Halloween, because I’m a big ball of useless junk when I finally wake up the next day. [Edit Deb: Hey! I made Halloween orange muffins in jack-lantern and ghost muffin pans... I'm not a total grinch!]
Let’s take a quick look back at some Halloween themed posts we’ve done in the past in order to honor the night, shall we?
Ratings Clack – Favre and Baseball create havoc
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 »
South Park does Ghost Hunters, Billy Mays and “Chipotlaway”
Check one item off the list I made earlier this week. Not that it was much of a surprise coming from Parker and Stone, but they went ahead and spoofed Michael Jackson right from the get-go. Actually, they went ahead and spoofed the slew of celebrity deaths from the past year, including Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and, of course, Billy Mays.
Ratings Clack – Heidi and Tim are back
It’s another week where the ratings news from cable is much more interesting than anything happening on the networks. The big story was the premiere of Project Runway (finally) on Lifetime, but there was plenty more fun to be had. Also getting in on the premiere game was Mad Men, Kourtney and Khloe, Hoarders, Ghost Hunters, and Flipping Out. There were also finales for Hawthorne, and Saving Grace. All that, plus records for True Blood, and the Degrassi kids. The networks countered with Octomom, and Shaq Vs. But not Shaq vs. Octomom, although I wouldn’t rule that out at this point. Read the rest of this entry »
Ghost Hunters – What I saw that you didn’t see
(Season 4, Episode 28 – “Portsmouth Lighthouse” – Season Finale)
Finally, the episode of Ghost Hunters that I got to see filmed back in October aired tonight. I was definitely curious to see how two nights of shooting would translate into an hour-long show. As it turns out, there’s a bit of stuff I was surprised they wound up having to cut.
As I said, this episode was shot throughout two nights, which I don’t believe was mentioned on the show. I honestly have a hard time recalling who was where on each night, but everyone got to investigate every part of the fort and lighthouse. So, for example, Steve and Tango did investigate the lighthouse at least once, but we never saw it.
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