Here’s some ratings detail on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League via FX (note the ratings noted are “coverage ratings” but the viewer averages still are comparable to other data you normally see on the site):

Sunny posted a 1.51 P18-49 rating for episode eight.  A lift of +68% over last week and the highest rating since week one.   Among M18-49, last night’s episode delivered a 1.94 rating or more than a million impressions.  Equally, if not more impressive, were M18-34 which notched a 3.06 rating or 853,000 impressions – highest since the premiere.

The League delivered a 1.10 rating among P18-49 for episode two, up +56% from its premiere (0.71).  Men 18-49 posted a 1.58, while M18-34 generated a whopping 2.61 rating — retaining 85% of its Sunny lead-in.

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On Monday Michael Ausiello posted a story that TNT might expand the existing episodes of Southland:

More good news on the Southland front: On the heels of this morning’s confirmation that TNT will run all 13 Southland episodes (including the six season 2 episodes that NBC never aired), comes word that the cable net may pad the seven season 1 eppys with never-before-seen bonus footage.

According to my go-to guy at Southland, Michael Cudlitz, “It’s my understanding that the actual episodes will have more airtime on TNT, so I believe they will be going back in and [adding] content. They’ll have the opportunity, and, in my opinion the need, to open up the [initial seven] episodes a little bit.”

It’s not clear to me where Mr. Cudlitz got his understanding that there would be more airtime on TNT.

Southland episodes are about as long as recent episodes of  The Closer, Saving Grace, Dark Blue and Leverage

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Sure, Stargate Universe only dropped 2 percent from the previous week,  but that won’t stop the haters from hating early, and often!

Friday cable finals via Travis Yanan:

Bulls vs Celtics (8:02pm, 151 minutes)
- 1.541 million viewers
- 1.1/2 HH
- 0.6/2 A18-49

Mavericks vs Lakers (10:33pm, 158 minutes)
- 2.132 million viewers
- 1.5/3 HH
- 1.0/4 A18-49

College Football (7:58pm, 209 minutes)
- 2.538 million viewers
- 1.7/3 HH
- 0.7/3 A18-49

Stargate Universe
- 1.974 million viewers
- 1.3/2 HH
- 0.8/2 A18-49

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via Reuters:

NEW YORK, Nov 2 (Reuters) – News Corp (NWSA.O) may drop its bid for the Travel Channel because parent company Cox Enterprises wants $1.1 billion for the cable channel, a price that the media conglomerate thinks is too expensive, a source with knowledge of the bids said on Monday.

This could get interesting.

TNT is expected to announce Monday that it will begin showing “Southland,” the critically acclaimed but abruptly canceled NBC police drama, starting in January. With the move, “Southland” becomes the rare TV series to be dropped by a broadcaster and revived by a cable outlet, where it will compete at 10 p.m. with NBC’s “The Jay Leno Show.”

via NYTimes.com.

Update: TNT has made the announcement, the show will air on Tuesdays at 10pm beginning January 12.

If you do click through to the entire article let me correct this from the first line:

the big but shrinking broadcast networks and the small but growing cable networks

Individual cable networks viewership is still smaller than most of the broadcast networks (although several are already larger than the CW), but collectively there have been more viewers in primetime for ad supported cable networks  than broadcast networks for quite some time.

Even if the ratings and carriage fees aren’t huge, the value of being in nearly 100 million homes apparently  is.  Brian Stelter at the New York Times writes:

Cox Communications is expected to command close to a billion dollars for the Travel Channel, people close to the bidding war for the channel said on Thursday.

The company is entertaining bids from a number of media companies, including the News Corporation and Scripps Networks, three people with knowledge of the auction said. The people requested anonymity because they were not authorized by their employers to discuss the confidential process. At least one of the offers exceeds $900 million, they said.

[...]

By the ratings and revenue metrics of cable channels, the Travel Channel is undistinguished. The channel, which counts “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and “Man v. Food” as its most popular shows, is distributed in nearly 100 million homes, but it earns on average just 6 cents per subscriber. It draws a modest average of 485,000 viewers in prime time.

More on NYTimes.com

Though $.06 a month per subscriber isn’t much, but Nielsen estimates the Travel Channel is available in 93,990,000 homes.  For purposes of back of the napkin math, I’m fine with calling that 100 million homes and figuring the $.06 per subscriber winds up being around $6 million in subscription revenue per month.

The cable model strives for a split between subscriber revenue and advertising revenue.  If they are able to obtain a 50-50 split, that would be another $6 million a month.  So back of the napkin gets it near $150 million in annual revenue. Fetching $1 billion would be somewhere around a 7X multiple of annual revenue.

Bill first wrote about cable networks abandoning their roots to grab  larger audiences almost four months ago. An article yesterday by The Washington Post’s Lisa de Moraes explores the theme in more depth and suggests that it’s not always so much an attempt to draw a bigger audience, but rather a younger one:

“Five years ago we had a big median-age issue,” A&E President and General Manager Bob DeBitetto told us. “The median age of the network was about 62 years old. With the possible exception of the Hallmark Channel, it was the oldest-skewing cable network — period. That’s a problem, regrettably. It’s a challenge for those of us that are in the advertiser-supported industry because . . . ad agencies target demographic delivery.”

“Target demographic delivery” is a politically correct way of saying “discriminate on the basis of age” — advertisers pay networks far less if they attract older viewers.

“We decided at some risk to begin to transform our programming approach, to introduce A&E to an entirely new generation of viewers,” DeBitetto explained.

Good bye, “Horatio Hornblower”; hello “Growing up Gotti.”

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Under the terms being negotiated, TNT will buy the seven episodes that ran last spring as well as the six new episodes that Warner Bros. and John Wells Productions made for NBC. The show is not going back into production because TNT will decide whether to order additional episodes of “Southland” after it sees how the drama performs. The show isn’t expected to make its cable debut until after the new year, and the new episodes might not run until late February or early March.

via Los Angeles Times.

That’s pretty much what I expected the deal to be. TNT salvages the episodes already produced and waits to see the ratings until ordering more. I wouldn’t bet on that happening, but the deal means the chance is no longer absolutely zero.