I received a few e-mails about the post on ABC Family’s Secret Life of an American Teenager doing better ratings-wise than Gossip Girl. Most of the e-mail went like this: Oh sure, pick on Gossip Girl but then RAVE about Mad Men. That’s not too hypocritical now, is it!?
I was originally titling this post “Is Mad Men Cable’s Gossip Girl?” A show with all the buzz, all the magazine covers, all the stories, all the critical acclaim and hardly watched by anyone. As I noted when I wrote about the Mad Men’s ratings improvement that as nice as it was, it would still not put it in the cable weekly top forty. And let’s face it, the show gets crushed by The Closer, WWE Raw, Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, Monk, Psych, Hannah Montana, iCarly, Back at the Barnyard and a whole lot of SpongeBob. And as Wayne Friedman notes, although the season two premiere of Mad Men more than doubled last season’s average, it only actually fared 20% better than last year’s premiere.
Am I a hypocrite? Perhaps. Though it took me four or five episodes to get completely sucked in to Mad Men, I definitely am completely sucked in now. Completely separate from the ratings, it’s definitely a quality show. My bashing of Gossip Girl and the CW is not about the quality of Gossip Girl. Is Gossip Girl a great quality show? I have no idea! I’m a 46 year old man, and there’s not really any basis for me to watch the show.
Even if I watched it, I still couldn’t opine on the quality of the show as it’s not really targeted at a general audience. It’s targeted at young people. I can’t opine on Gossip Girl when it comes to quality. All I can tell you is I’ve seen Blake Lively interviewed a few times and seen a video of her on YouTube being accosted by a gaggle of teenage girls and she seems like a truly lovely person who handles everything very well.
Is Mad Men the Gossip Girl of cable television? I don’t really think so for one reason: AMC isn’t a broadcast network and it’s never been that huge of a cable network. I would argue that CW should be able to have at least one show that consistently performs as well as Burn Notice or In Plain Sight perform for USA. It doesn’t. I wouldn’t make the same argument about Mad Men/AMC.
But when it comes to the question of “is Mad Men the Gossip Girl for adults?” Yes, I think it is. It has all the buzz, critics swoon over it, it truly is a fabulous show, but…hardly anyone watches it. There’s a lot of television I love that doesn’t pull fabulous numbers. The Wire and Dexter come to mind. Sure, those shows both ran/run on subscription cable channels – but so did The Sopranos, which routinely was near the top of the weekly cable top 40.
hmm thats true, not many people know much about ratings, so for all they know all this media around gossip girl is normal…
I Like the CW but it goes on about Gossip girl when it ignors shows like One Tree Hill that do better in ratings??
As iv said before, I live in the UK and gossip girl usualy gets around 144.000 viewers for its first showing, and with repeats around 300.000, which really isnt good as its on the number 1 cable channel
If anyone has any other questions about UK ratings, feel free to ask
yyeaaa gossip is the best
I never watched Gossip Girl while it aired on TV, but i swear on everything I own (I'm in college, and live in a dorm) that everything shut down on the nights Gossip Girl came on. Pretty much every other girl on my floor who owned a tv, and girls without tv's who huddled around those of their friends', sat glued to the screen. My room was one of these. My roommate was NEVER in my room, except on GG nights, along with some of her friends. This was not only my floor, but ALL of the other floors I so happened to visit at that time. GG was gospel, and college girls were the faithful disciples.
So, I understand what everyone is saying about the ratings. The CW has no excuse for consistently ranking beneath cable stations, but from my own personal experience, something has to be going wrong for them. From what I see, a LOT of people love gossip girl…real people…not hype from a company. It's not just my school either, I've heard identical stories from my friends at different schools. Maybe the fact that I live on the east coast with NY wannabees has something to do with it, and maybe we're (yes, I watched the entire season online illegally this summer…it was actually very entertaining) the only ones watching it, but Nielsen isn't always right in its methods or calculations, so give the CW a break. please? lol
Exactly harris43. I’m 17 year old and almost every single girl in my grade is completely obsessed with the show.
Plus, magazines don’t put people on their cover based on the buzz. I mean, of course they do, but if the person does not have selling power, they won’t be featured at the cover and that’s it. But Gossip Girl stars were on Nylon, Seventeen, Cosmogirl, Entertainment Weekly, Lucky, Teen Vogue and even Vanity Fair (Blake Lively) so OBVIOUSLY there are REAL people out there watching the show and craving to know more about the cast.