Valentine’s Day didn’t heart network television, especially early in the evening. ABC:  About the best that can be said about the 1.3 debut of ZERO HOUR is that it edged out NBC and CW for 3rd place in the hour.  It’s a terrible start for a densely-plotted, serialized show that’s unlikely to lure many viewers […]

You know it’s a weird night when the clearest-cut winner is Community. FOX:  As of this morning’s preliminary numbers, FOX won the night, but it’s loaded with asterisks.  AMERICAN IDOL‘s 3.5 may change because it ran until 9:32PM–for now, it’s down 0.3 from last week, and down a giant 1.4 from this time last year. […]

The NBA playoffs continued on three networks this weekend, and the eight games collectively were very close to the comparable games last year (+1% overall).  The two ABC games were the highest-rated by far: a 5.0 household rating for Miami-Milwaukee and 4.1 rating for New York-Boston (in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets that comprise 70% of […]

  FRIDAY STARZ:  It doesn’t appear as though DA VINCI’S DEMONS is going to be a gamechanger for Starz, as the series debuted with a tame 0.4 in 18-49s, about half of the total viewership of 1M.  That was coming off a 0.6 rating for the series finale of SPARTACUS: WAR OF THE DAMNED, which […]

  The nasty parade of season and series lows continued last night. FOX:  AMERICAN IDOL crossed 2 ugly milestones last night.   Its 2.8 rating (down half a point from last week), apart from being an all-time Wednesday low for the series (including its first season, when it ran during the summer), marked the first time […]

  We’re continuing our survey of the fall primetime schedule (our merry band includes former head of NBC Scheduling Mitch Metcalf, former head of NBC Current Programming Ted Frank and myself) with Thursdays, when CBS will finally do what people have been expecting for the past several seasons and expand to a 4-sitcom night.  (Here […]

Here are the weekend sports ratings for Saturday and Sunday February 25-26, 2017.  Eligible programs include sporting events on broadcast and cable networks (minimum audience size 150K P2+).  Programs are grouped by sport and ranked within each sport by P2+ audience size. For comparison, here is the same chart for the same weekend last year, February 27-28, 2016: […]

  Basketball, as always, beat Broadway last night. ABC:  Per Mitch Metcalf:  we have adjusted the 4.6 fast national adult 18-49 rating for NBA FINALS GAME 2  to an estimated 5.4 rating.  However, the 5.4 would still be 17% below the Sunday night game last year (on June 17), a similar decline to Game 1 on […]