UPDATE: Fox has renewed Moment of Truth, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, Don’t Forget the Lyrics, Moment of Truth and ‘Til Death for Fall 2008. Fox has cancelled Back to You, Canterbury’s Law and New Amsterdam.

Moving on to Fox, which has quite a few shows with unannounced futures including Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, New Amsterdam, Canterbury’s Law, Back to You, Don’t Forget the Lyrics, Moment of Truth, Return of Jezebel James, ‘Til Death, Kitchen Nightmares and Unhitched.

Since the lack of Fox announcements has so many shows “on the bubble” I’m going to do a more wholesale analysis than I did with the 3 CBS shows earlier.

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Scoreboard for Sat, March 22, 2008
Total Viewers (million)	9.22	6.07	5.41	5.38
Rating/Share: Adults 18-49	3.5/11	2.1/7	1.3/4	1.7/5

The first night of NCAA regional finals scored a victory across the board for CBS.  While I love Marc Berman for regularly making Nielsen Ratings data available, even on weekends, I have to take a loving poke at him for his comment of:

As I have said in the past, and will continue to keep saying in the future, viewers will indeed respond if the broadcast networks are aggressive on Saturday.

Ok, sure Marc.  If you put on an NFL game (especially a playoff, or the Patriots in quest of 16-0) on a Saturday - something people care about, people will definitely watch TV on a Saturday night no question.  But how aggressive can you be with a limited number of events like that? 

Sure, CBS could move CSI to Saturdays and beat the snot out of FOX’s bad boys, but the question is, would they make as much money as they would by broadcasting it Thursdays at 9pm?  CBS has concluded “no” and while I can’t agree with CBS about sticking Big Brother on at Tuesday at 9pm, I definitely agree with CBS here.     

Still, I agree with Marc Berman that it’s possible to crack the code, but I think the challenge is downright daunting at this point.  P.S. I don’t think “family TV” is all that unheralded either.  It’s baked into the numbers ALL the time.  Step 1. divide the persons 2+ by the households to get average viewers per screen.  Step 2. Look at list of shows with high average viewers per screen. Voila!  There’s your list of “unheralded family TV”.   It’s math, but hardly rocket science.  I might go ahead and start making the chart except I pretty much know off the top of my head it’s American Idol, Extreme Makeover, etc. 

Why am I talking about this stuff at all?  Because there wasn’t really anything besides the basketball worth mentioning.  See for yourself, and go Davidson!

Saturday night’s details:

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for toppling my NCAA pick (Georgetown) and Bill Gorman’s (Wisconsin).   I’ll be rooting for Davidson to topple Kansas tonight.  I’m sure Bill will be too, though sadly, that probably spells the kiss of death.   It’s hard not to like Stephen Curry though, check out this video clip from last Monday’s Pardon the Interruption on ESPN.

My brother Steve, who’s not quite as avid of a sports fan as I am, but enjoys the NCAA tourney and I have had some conversations where he’s complained about the excessive number of television timeouts during the CBS NCAA coverage.

Today he cited recent columns from Washington Post columnists John Feinstein and Mark Cuban’s favorite person, Leonard Shapiro which were critical of some aspects of the CBS tournament coverage and also complained about all the timeouts. 

I asked him if they’d brought up the fact that CBS paid $6 BILLION for the rights to the tourney for 11 years and he said they did bring it up so I went and read the articles.

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David Bianculli is reporting that Friday Night Lights will return to NBC for another season.

The wording in his story leads me to believe that this ties into the rumored NBC/DirecTV deal we reported on earlier.

I’m interested to see the terms of the deal, if they are ever revealed, because Friday Night Lights performance in the ratings was woeful this season.

This story also has reports FNL rertuning to NBC in the fall (scroll down to the bottom of the link.)

I’m gonna go cold turkey after this.  I wouldn’t even write this except for getting an e-mail message about one of the comments I’d made on a Jericho post, where I said a part of me thinks Carol Barbee’s actions are completely reprehensible.  That generated one very thoughtful response in e-mail.

The e-mail I received was basically a very nice way of asking me,  how and why I could say such a thing about Ms. Barbee.  Here is my response.

I’m usually OK with speculating (obviously), and sometimes - sometimes, I’m OK with just completely pulling stuff out of my…thin air.  But not when it comes to talking about shows and the people who love them. I know it will shock you with as much of a misanthrope as I can be that I actually care about people. 

It seemed to me that if I wanted to write about Jericho what would be right was to actually watch Jericho.  I made it through about the first 3/4^th of season one, before conking out because for me, the pace was just to slow.  But then with encouragement from fans that the pace quickened pretty much right where I stopped, I finished them up.  I did enjoy the remainder of the episodes as well as season two.  So I’m writing this as someone who has seen every episode of Jericho (and I watched the finale twice!).

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I’m going to hold off posting overnight numbers until I can put the viewer numbers in a table, but NBC took the night in viewers with CBS winning the 18-49 demo with its NCAA coverage.  NBC seems to have had fantastic performance from Dateline at 10pm according to our friends at Zap2it.