The only entertainment America wanted with its turkey last night was football.
NBC: NFL FOOTBALL swamped the night, with what we expect will be a 7.0 rating when numbers are adjusted early next week. That would be just about even with last year’s Thanksgiving night game.
CBS: The Eye also benefited from football, thanks to a half-hour long overrun for the afternoon game (4.9 for a BIG BANG THEORY rerun would be crazy even for that show). Once the game ended, the network ran back-to-back reruns, with the 8:30PM show benefiting from what was left of the football crowd. After that, things settled down to the 1s.
FOX: It’s not clear why FOX chose to run fresh episodes of its series on such a little-watched night (it may declare them “specials” to remove them from series averages for PR purposes)–when it did that last year, at least it had the afternoon NFL game to provide a big lead-in. Without that this year, THE X FACTOR and a puppet-laden GLEE hit series lows of 1.0 and 0.9 respectively. In the latter show’s case, it certainly didn’t build any momentum for next week’s midseason finale.
ABC: The year’s run of A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING was up a nice 0.5 from last year’s holiday airing to 1.6. After a 1.1 MODERN FAMILY rerun, though, a new LADY GAGA AND THE MUPPETS SPECIAL had a wretched 0.9.
CW: The lights were barely kept on by a run of the movie YOU AGAIN at 0.2.
A mixed bag tonight on the networks, mostly reruns and holiday specials (notably a Garth Brooks show on CBS), but also new episodes of GRIMM and DRACULA on NBC, RAISING HOPE on FOX and NIKITA on CW.
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