Last night’s Super Bowl was the most watched program.
Period. Of the night, the week, the year, the Christian era, you name it—at 106.5 million viewers, it broke the record held for 27 years by the finale of M*A*S*H. (Which means that that many people, give or take a few million bathroom breaks, watched that crappy Dodge ad.)
As I’m …
Let me take off my TV-critic hat for a minute and put on my TV-business hat. Everyone’s assumption now—a well-founded one, it seems—is that, forced to choose between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, NBC will pick Jay. Leaving aside fairness, funniness or cosmic justice, is that the right business pick?
Short-term, I have to say: …
There actually is some good news for NBC today, even if, naturally, it comes from a show that the network was once on the verge of ensuring would never see another season. The double-shot season premiere of Chuck got the spy comedy-drama its best ratings since its 3D stunt episode last year.
Celebrate, but don’t relax …
Love him or hate him, success or failure, Jay Leno taking over NBC’s 10 p.m. slot is the biggest TV story of the year. And now that he’s been on-air for a couple months, the assessments of his ratings performance have been coming in.
On the one hand, Leno’s been the subject of one bad ratings story after another for weeks, as he some …
CNN is a sister company to TIME within Time Warner, so let me be unambiguous and without corporate favor when I say that its latest round of primetime ratings are in the dumpster. Bill Carter of the New York Times reports that for the first time, CNN will finish October in fourth place among cable-news networks in the advertiser-followed …
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
That was the sound of broadcast network television getting run over, twice, by FX’s biker drama, Sons of Anarchy, Tuesday night. For the first time, SoA defeated both NBC’s Jay Leno Show and ABC’s The Forgotten in the 18 to 49 ratings, which, as network programmers will tell you incessantly, is the only rating …
Following up on yesterday’s news about Dollhouse’s increase in viewing from DVRs comes news—prompted by that 50% ratings increase—that Fox is committing to at least air all 13 episodes of Dollhouse’s season two. As for season three, we’ll see later. I would not make plans at this point.
Yesterday’s release of the DVR info led to …
The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd has a breakdown of the DVR-viewing figures for TV premiere week. Among other things they show that Dollhouse’s rating goes up 50% when you add in timeshifted DVR viewing.
Mind you, that’s 50% of precious little, lifting it from an anemic 1.0 rating to a slightly less anemic 1.5. DVR viewing was …
A month into his run on the air, it’s about the time for observers to start weighing in on NBC’s Great Leno Experiment at 10 p.m. But as I alluded to the other day, the problem is determining what constitutes success and failure for The Jay Leno Show. Since it is a cost-containment measure before anything, it can’t be judged by the same …
Now that the TV-cost-reduction experiment otherwise known as The Jay Leno Show is in its third week, the numbers are starting to accumulate. After a big debut, his average nightly take has been bouncing around 6 million or so—above, but not a lot above, the 5 million he averaged on Tonight—depending on the strength of his NBC lead-in …
Last night, the first broadcast of The Jay Leno Show drew a whopping 17.7 million viewers, many of them with their original teeth. As the guy who wrote the story with the “Future of TV” cover line, I should probably just leave it at that and call it a day. But let’s take a look at what does and doesn’t matter about that number, in ways …
Between Leno duty and returning from vacation, I never got around to reviewing The CW’s The Vampire Diaries, but judging by its premiere last night, I’ll have plenty of time to get around to it. The Kevin Williamson show ended up being The CW’s highest-rated debut ever at 4.8 million viewers, proving there’s still blood in …
A few bits of ratings news as we start to get warmed up for premiere season:
* President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress drew 32.1 million viewers, up from the 24.5 million his last primetime health care press conference drew (though not not up to the massive audiences he was getting just after his inauguration).