Comments on: Ratings Monday, September 22: First Night Wins To ABC, CBS & NBC

By: STYLE

STYLE — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:16:35 +0000

Julia,
for more info on the lawsuit against NBC and tim kring GOOGLE ENJAI AND AMNAU EELE OR THE EELE TWINS.
join the movement to put tim kring in JAIL.

By: FrankJ

FrankJ — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:37:49 +0000

Robert, I'm curious about your take on this. Apparently Ausiello has some news on Terminator and the ratings, and he's saying that the status is that FOX isn't going to buy the back 9 episodes unless the show "starts to climb" in the ratings. An SCC insider tells me that if the show's numbers don't start to climb, Fox is unlikely to order any additional episodes beyond the 13 currently in the pipeline. At Saturday's EW pre-Emmy bash, Thomas Dekker remained hopeful that they could hold off doomsday at least until the end of football season. "We¹re up against Monday Night Football," he sighed, "which is tricky because we have a lot of football fans." What kind of ratings improvement do you think SCC needs to show every week to satisfy FOX it's starting to climb? Curious why they didn't give a range of numbers the show needs to pull in to be viable. Wonder if this means that Warner Brothers is trying to keep the thing going through the movie at least?

By: Julia

Julia — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:37:10 +0000

Style, I’m not a Heroes fan, so I don’t follow the news, but what you are talking about sounds intriguing. Do you have a link so I can read up on it?

By: STYLE

STYLE — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:32:09 +0000

Heroes is no longer a hit show because Tim kring is a hack writer that TRIED to rip off the original creators of the Heroes concept.
NBC has wasted a lot of time and money by not contacting the original creators for story lines that are creative.
Who needs a sci-fi tv show that presents a cheerleader knocking a super hero out with a cheerleading trophy?
Tim Kring is a liar, the strike didn’t effect the storylines, it was the lawsuit that is now in a NYC Appellate court.
If this lawsuit is turned around by the plaintiffs, NBC will have a massive problem on their hands.
And all for what? Because some clown that thinks he is a writer, wanted 15 minutes of fame.

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:50:14 +0000

I really think people need to beg their friends and help generate buzz for TSCC. It is too good of a show to let die due to Fox’s faulty marketing. I mean over the years how many brilliant shows has Fox just let die. I mean Arrested Development won every award, was universally declared as hilarious, had big stars and Fox never once thought that “hey maybe this show isnt being marketed right?” I was skeptical when I first heard of TSCC, but it really is a brilliant show and I want to see where its going to go. I dont really watch it for the action, if I want action I’ll put on a John Woo film. I like the dialogue and the interplay between John and Cameron and if I dont ever find out if John gets with Cameron Im going to invent skynet and find out.

Also Heroes is suffering the way the NHL did. They had a pretty large audience, but it was a niche audience mostly who already had reasons to be ticked at the show. The strike hit and the millions of fans who cooled on Heroes got their reason to step away and broke free.

By: Guess Who

Guess Who — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:08:28 +0000

5 million for PB is pretty bad – cant imagine it will be around for another Season. I stopped watching it after the first episode this season when it turned into some kind of Mission Impossible imititation. Last 2 seasons were nothing to write home about either.

HEROES? Only thing saving that one is its 18-49 and 18-34 ratings which are still very high. The series itself went off a cliff starting with the Season 1 finale. It just hasnt been the same since. Mohinder turning into the fly after stealing the plot device of injections to give regular people superpowers from THE 4400 (Season 4) is just too unoriginal. Will everyone get powers of will 50% die like they did in THE 4400? Some day that plot device is what finished off THE 4400 for good – will it be the case with HEROES too? Probably not as long as the key demos hold up. And Nathan appears to be channeling Jordan Collier from the 4400 – I will throw up my hands if Nathan starts a HEROES CENTER and starts healing people. The last thing we need is for HEROES to be replace with another brain dead talent, singing or game show.

By: nana

nana — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:21:40 +0000

Also 5 million and if it comes in 4th place no matter how they try to spin it, it still didn’t do well at all.
Thanks again Robert.

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:57:45 +0000

I would say that 5 million is pretty low-rated for Fox,but it was almost 6 million and there are other factors to consider (cost, demographic viewers, etc). there are no easy answers other than compared to House or American Idol, it’s a really low number.

By: nana

nana — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:25:09 +0000

Thanks Robert. I have another question a show like Prison Break that get’s 5 million viewers is that good or bad?I mean some people keep justifying it saying it didn’t do bad but isn’t 5 millions low rated in the eyes of a pretty big network like fox? Thanks.

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:46:20 +0000

.5 = 1/2. so 3.5 million = three and a half million. 3.1 million = 3 million, one hundred thousand, 3.2 = three million two hundred thousand, etc.

By: nana

nana — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:40:39 +0000

Can someone please answer me this.If a show get’s 3.5 million viewers.I can understand the 3 million but was does the .5 mean?

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:16:05 +0000

Fox prides themselve on having its news “first” at 10pm and they have been doing that since they first were created, so i doubt they will ever change

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:47:07 +0000

Indeed, the affiliates would NEVER give up the 10pm slot. And I don’t think Mr. Murdoch is thrilled with this. When recently asked whether he’d buy NBC (assuming it was for sale), he said he wasn’t really interested and that he liked the USA cable network as a property but didn’t like the local station affiliate model (even though Fox is in that business as well).

in the longer term, I believe the local model is completely hosed anyway, but we’re not there yet.

By: Bill Gorman

Bill Gorman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:32:49 +0000

Julia is exactly correct. Those 10PM news shows for the local Fox affiliates are some of their biggest money makers.

By: Catherine

Catherine — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:57:45 +0000

I was all ready to settle in to a night of CBS comedies and the always “entertaining” CSI: Miami, but after watching 20 minutes of Worst Week (my husband lasted 12) I switched to the end of The Rachel Madow Show. Worst Week just wasn’t funny…at all. I didn’t laugh once. I will just do something else for that half hour. How could they keep up that premise? I don’t really care for How I Met Your Mother but Neil Patrick Harris makes the show entertaining when he is on.

Have patience with your technical difficulties. Good luck.

By: Julia

Julia — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:20:06 +0000

My brother used to sell ads for a local Fox affiliate (he works for ABC now) and he said that the local affiliates would never be willing to give up the 10 o’clock news.

By: John

John — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:04:46 +0000

Fox…10 pm……Fox 10 oclock news anyone? Could explain why they don’t drop a show there. Not saying they couldn’t change everything around, but that could be the explaination for now.

By: Mike G.

Mike G. — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:54:13 +0000

I think it is interesting that K-ville and TSCC are being compared simply because they do not share a common time slot. K-ville had the benefit of a PB lead in where as TSCC has to find its own viewers in the old PB time slot. Honestly, I don’t think that a PB lead in would help TSCC at all. There is way too much competition in general on that evening for the “geek” audience at 8:00. Interesting also that TSCC is a second season show whereas K-ville was a brand new show at that point. So, the comparison, while interesting, seems imperfect to me.

I like the idea of Fox expanding into the 10 pm hour. Why they haven’t done that yet is a mystery to me since a number of its shows are good candidates for that time slot.

Joe, I share your pessimism about investing time in shows that are heading in the wrong direction. That’s why I’m avoiding getting into any of the new shows because I anticipate that a number of them are going to be canceled. Once it seems like a show is going to stay on the air, I’ll probably join it…or make fun of it, whichever seems more appropriate. But, personally, I’m not jumping off the TSCC ship until it sinks, and I really hope that most people don’t. Granted, we don’t impact the ratings, but if Nielsen folks have the same mentality…

Holly, it seems that there is an underlying, unstated assumption, especially implied in the football as competition argument that there are more people watching cable shows than ever before and that is affecting the ratings for those shows. I think I’ve used that excuse also for TSCC simply because when it aired in January, it was not really up against Mon night football because the season was winding down. I think PB’s problem, which has been echoed by several posters, is that the show has decreased in quality. Now, I’ve never been interested in PB, and I honestly think that it appeals to a different audience than TSCC does, and PB’s audience is just getting tired of the show.

I hope this year that the networks actually let the shows run all of their episodes…even if they send them into the ghost town of Fri and Sat evenings. There is still one episode of K-ville out there that I am miffed about not being able to see.

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:40:36 +0000

Julia — its getting there. :-/. I believe we have some kind of configuration issue which winds up consuming a lot of server resources and CPU cycles and ultimately causes problems w/the MySQL database. If we can’t get to the bottom of this, we will have to switch, but it’s thorny because I’ll be moving my residence ~ October 10, and I didn’t really want to have to deal with that kind of switch before then as it can wind up eating hours of my time. But this way is no fun either…

By: dave

dave — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:34:52 +0000

Heroes 5.5 in the YA demo is incredible. I bet if they broke it down to YA males, those numbers would be astronomical. This is a huge moneymaker for NBC.

Worst week under performing mother in the better time slot does not bode well for the new show. CBS rightfully expects big numbers from its 9:30 laffers, so I don’t expect this one to have legs.

BBT hasn’t picked up any viewers over the summer which is too bad because I really like that show.

I don’t care what CW says; gossip girl with 2.5 is still not competing with the big boys.

By: Julia

Julia — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:25:12 +0000

Speaking of site problems, was the internal server error this morning enough to drive you guys to a new host?

By: Robert Seidman

Robert Seidman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:18:48 +0000

Angie, yes CW did do a press release for Smallville and Supernatural, but because we are having problems with our site, we didn’t see it initially.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:13:01 +0000

FrankJ,

Maybe highly discussed by you on this board. TSCC never got a buzz factor.

By: Holly

Holly — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:10:17 +0000

Raiheen,
Neilen’s does release DVR numbers (we’ll see the numbers for tonight in two weeks), and the networks do track (legal) online viewing. HOWVER, even with DVRs and online viewing added, Heroes would not be the most watched show of the night, not even close. It will probably gain around 1 million through DVR (the numbers we have here include people who DVR’ed it and watched it before 3 am). It will gain less than half that in online viewers.

By: Angie

Angie — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:08:57 +0000

I hate the CW . . . did they do ANY press released on Smallville/Supernatural (which trounced Gossip Girl and OTH in the final ratings)?