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Ratings
June 20, 2007
With summer in full swing, what are heat-avoiding viewers watching on television? Reality shows and a few reruns.
The most-watched show last week, according to Nielsen Media Research, was NBC’s trainwreck “America’s Got Talent,” which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we really don’t (have talent). Or if we do, the producers of this show haven’t found it.
Could the 11.8 million people watching “Talent” be hoping to see judge David Hasselhoff show up drunk and drooling a juicy hamburger all over himself? Maybe. Probably.
Also in the summer Nielsen Top 20 last week were Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance,” “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” and “Hell’s Kitchen.”
Reality notwithstanding, CBS retained its total household lead, thanks to the enduring popularity of its procedural dramas “NCIS,” “CSI,” “CSI: Miami,” “CSI: New York,” “Cold Case” and “Without a Trace.”
If Nielsen ranked cable networks AND broadcast networks, the third season premiere of TNT’s “The Closer” would have been 12th, far ahead of eight broadcast programs in the top 20. The Monday night season opener of “The Closer” drew 8.8 million viewers — a new record for a series on a basic-cable network.
February 1, 2007
It’s not just us, we swear: Variety gives “Friday Night Lights” some much-needed love, too, suggesting that maybe NBC should move the show to Friday nights (good, sensible) or maybe swap it with “Studio 60” (even better!).
Please, just get it out of the path of the “American Idol” boulder. Somebody. Please.
(Link via Defamer.)
December 29, 2006
The full results of the November sweeps are in — total TV households and demographic information.
What’s new and earth-shaking? Well, not really very much.
KVUE, Austin’s ABC affiliate owned by Belo Corp., maintained its crown as the local news leader weeknights at 5, 6 and 10 p.m.
KXAN, the NBC affiliate owned by LIN television (and the station that has seen more comings and goings than a liquor store before New Year’s Eve), kept its strong second place at 6 p.m.
But KXAN came within a fraction of a rating point of getting nipped for No. 2 at 10 p.m., where CBS-owned KEYE surged on the strength of CBS’s prime-time lineup.
The numbers weren’t so happy for KEYE elsewhere. At 5 p.m., KEYE, anchored by Austin vets Judy Maggio and Ron Oliveira, was thumped by “Jeopardy” on KXAN and by “The Simpsons” on KTBC at 6 p.m. Ouch!
On the network news front, Austin still puts ABC’s news at No. 1, followed by NBC and CBS.
Among prime-time shows, we were just like everybody else, boosting ABC series such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Dancing with the Stars” and “Desperate Housewives” to the top of the ratings chart. Only one NBC show topped our charts — “Deal or No Deal.”
Check out rating details below, provided by Nielsen Media Research.
NOVEMBER NIELSENS
Note: HH= ratings for total households; DM= ratings in the 25-54 age demographic
5 p.m. Local news
KVUE — 6.8 HH/2.7 DM
KXAN (“Jeopardy”) — 4.1 HH/1.2 DM
KEYE — 3.0 HH/1.3 DM
KTBC — 2.5 HH/1.00 DM
5:30 Network news
ABC 6.7 HH (KVUE)
NBC 5.4 HH (KXAN)
CBS 2.9 HH (KEYE)
6 p.m. Local news
KVUE — 7.2 HH/3.3 DM
KXAN — 6.1 HH/2.2 DM
KTBC (“The Simpsons”) — 4.1 HH/3.2DM
KEYE — 3.0 HH/1.6DM
10 p.m. Local news
KVUE — 8.3 HH/5.3 DM
KXAN — 6.4 HH/4.2 DM
KEYE — 6.3 HH/3.6 DM
KTBC (“The Simpsons”) — 4.0 HH/ 2.8 DM
[KTBC’s late news is 9-10 p.m. — 4.5 HH/3.0 DM]
Top 15 prime-time shows in Central Texas for November
“Grey’s Anatomy” (ABC)
“Dancing with the Stars,” performance (ABC)
“Desperate Housewives” (ABC)
“Dancing with the Stars,” results (ABC)
“Lost” (ABC)
“Saturday Night Football” (ABC)
“House” (FOX)
“CSI” (CBS)
“CSI: Miami” (CBS)
“Country Music Awards” (ABC)
“Ugly Betty” (ABC)
“Two and a Half Men” (CBS)
“Deal or No Deal” (NBC)
“Barbara Walters Special” (ABC)
“Criminal Minds” (CBS)
According to Nielsen, there are 602,340 TV Households in the Austin television market, so one rating point equals 6,023 households.
October 23, 2006
ADDENDUM (Tues. a.m.): The guest blog (below) was written prior to last night’s episode, which was a definite change of pace. D.L. Hughley, for instance, got a lot more airtime, to largely good effect. Though I’m still not persuaded he’s a convincing sketch comedian, he demonstrated that, as an actor, he can hold his own with Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.
Nate Corddry got a lot more exposure, too, though less effectively — he still strikes me as a bit whiny, and he was saddled with a hackneyed set of standard-issue midwestern parents (mom: hand-wringing, long-suffering; dad: stoic, uptight; both of them: humorless and culturally clueless) and a heart-tugging subplot that lacked an ounce of nuance or surprise.
I basically enjoyed the guest appearance by UT alum Eli Wallach (engineered, perhaps, by the show’s co-exec producer, UT alum Thomas Schlamme?), though, again, I saw the basic outlines of his story from the first five minutes.
But the big relief was the complete absence of sub-par sketches or overripe anxiety about how this week’s show was going to be put together. (The plot revolved around the cast’s weekly wrap party.) Without either of those elements, Sorkin was able to focus on character and storytelling, which he did with his usual flair (if not quite his usual knack for surprise). The most promising note was the hiring of a new writer for the show-within-the-show, which I hope will prompt Sorkin to spend more time portraying what goes on in the writers’ room. Right now, the show’s portrait of the creative process is Matt Perry sitting in front of a computer pulling out his hair.
Still, I’m not quite sure that Sorkin is quite sure what “Studio 60� is supposed to be about. This episode’s three main story lines found their sense of gravity outside of the world of modern-day show business – the Wallach story line harked back to the 1950s blacklist, the Hughley story line to inner-city violence and Corddry’s to, improbably, the war in Afghanistan. These are all worthy and weighty topics, but if they indicate the direction Sorkin is planning on taking “Studio 60,� then he’s offering us something I didn’t expect at all — “The West Wing� by other means.
GUEST BLOG: No new shows started the season with higher expectations than “Friday Night Lights” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and no new shows have tanked so ignominously in the ratings. My colleague Diane Holloway does an excellent job of setting out why people aren’t watching “Friday Night Lights” in her TV column, so I thought I’d try to do the same with “Studio 60” — which has seen a steady decline in audience, drawing 13.4 million viewers for its debut but only 8.6 million for last week’s episode.
There isn’t one problem that explains “Studio 60’s” struggles; there’s a bunch of them. (And I say this as someone who likes the show a lot.) Diane has her own list that she might share with you if you ask, but here are four of mine:
1) The set. I’m told that in person, the theater where “Studio 60” is shot is big and impressive. But on TV, it looks dirty, dark and cramped. Is this a place where viewers want to spend an hour each week? The sense of claustrophobia is exacerbated by Aaron Sorkin’s writing style, what with all those people walking and talking, talking fast, talking over each other and talking sotto voce to themselves. The palatial environs of the White House gave the overlapping conversations on “The West Wing” some room to breathe, but on “Studio 60” you constantly feel as if you’re overhearing — and, often, only half-hearing — prisoners huddled together, whispering their escape plans.
2) The cast. Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Steven Weber, Sarah Paulson and Amanda Peet are all terrific, but I have my doubts about the second tier of actors. D.L. Hughley is a talented enough comedian, and I remember liking him on the short-lived “The Hughleys” (and enjoying interviewing him on that show’s set years ago), but he has an odd voice — high in pitch, thin and grainy in timbre — that has trouble registering amid Sorkin’s trademark hubbub. I find myself hitting rewind and trying to simply hear the guy a lot of the time.
And what I do hear isn’t all that impressive; five episodes in, his Simon Stiles hasn’t really emerged as either a particularly strong character or a funny guy. In the second episode, Simon complained to Perry’s Matt Albie that he’s a Yale-trained actor, not the sort of guy who does “voices” (which he proceeded to confirm by doing a Bill Cosby imitation that’s about as good — or bad — as mine). You couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a bit of unintentional honesty leaking out about Hughley’s miscasting as a sketch comedian.
I’m not much more impressed with Nate Corddry’s Tom Jeter, who seems like a pretty thin character — high-strung, insecure and eternally put-upon. And Ayda Field’s Jeannie Whatley has made no impression whatsoever. A show like this needs to be filled with charismatic, larger-than-life actors who make being a sketch comedian seem like the greatest job in the world. But in five episodes, have any of these people elicited a single laugh? Which brings me to …
3) The skits. The fake Gilbert & Sullivan number that climaxed the second episode was pretty audacious, but since then we’ve been subject to some terribly unfunny skits-within-the-show. “Meet the Press with Juliette Lewis”? “Nicolas Cage, Marriage Counselor”? Beside having a somewhat 1995 feel to them, they’re the sort of random, cut-and-paste humor that Albie is supposedly saving the show-within-the show from. I don’t watch Nancy Grace, so some of the bit’s finer points may have been lost on me, but last week’s parody of her CNN show seemed to go on, mirthlessly, forever. A handful of posters to imdb.com suggest that the skits are supposed to be bad, but this seems untenable to me — every week, we see Albie struggling to crank out some comedy genius on deadline, and each week the results are lauded as such. (If, on the other hand, Sorkin holds the entire genre of late-night humor in contempt, then this show has bigger problems than I can enumerate here.)
My guess is that writing sketch comedy is something that Sorkin is not very good at (it requires different skills than character-based humor, at which he is brilliant) or maybe he’s just stretched too thin to switch back and forth between modes. In either case, he needs to loosen up his legendary stranglehold; Sorkin should hire experienced — or young and hungry — sketch writers and let them run wild. Even if they do, though, I think the show has problems with …
4) Tone. The sense of portentousness that Sorkin perfected on “The West Wing” — his ability to spend an hour hinting that something important is buried beneath all that smart chatter and then, at the end of the episode, unveil a secret that tells us something unexpected yet true about a character and a situation — doesn’t play quite as well when the stakes are so much lower. This is show biz, not foreign policy, so when Albie realized at the end of the third episode that it was Danny who inserted a provocative question into a focus group study (really, I’m making it sound more exciting than it was), it resulted in a shrug rather than the force of revelation Sorkin was going for.
It’s not that we’re incapable of caring about the fortunes of show-biz types; the success of everything from “Entourage” to “Entertainment Tonight” suggests that we care very much. It’s that our relationship to celebrity is a two-faced one; build Britney up one day, tear her down the next. The whiff of saintliness that emanated from President Bartlet on “The West Wing” wasn’t realistic, but it worked as a form of wish-fulfillment; we’d all like our politicians to be that virtuous. But does anybody care if exorbitantly well-paid TV producers are martyrs for their art?
If somebody told me that Lorne Michaels is a genuinely good guy who stands up for his employees, I’d be happy for the people who work for him. But it’d be a lot more entertaining to hear stories about what a crass opportunist he is.
August 3, 2005
Stumbled on NBC’s new reality show “Meet Mister Mom” last night, and guess what? It’s not awful.
In fact, it was actually funny and sweet. The first episode featured two Austin families, which we wrote about in Saturday’s paper.
The concept is simple: Two families give up their moms, and the dads take over. They are graded on things like parenting, nutrition and time management. The dads face challenges, such as hosting spend-the-night parties and building soap-box racers.
Meanwhile, the moms are off enjoying life at a spa or learning how to do fancy bartender tricks.
The prize is $25,000 for an education fund.
Future episodes won’t be filmed in Austin, but if the future chosen families are anything like the Smiths and the Potters of Austin, “Mister Mom” should hold up. Both families were chaotic but loving, and both dads were good dads from the get-go. And by the end of the hour, they had new appreciation for their wives and kids.
There were nice little touches along the way, like the Potter Dad “bonding” with a llama that was sent to the house as an extra pet-caring duty. Romantic music and slow-mo scenes showed him walking with and kissing said llama. Warm and fuzzy.
The best news is the kids were not brats. Most reality shows portray parents as inept and kids as brats. “Mister Mom,” at least in the early going, is considerably more appealing than the average family reality disaster.
Give ‘Real World’ Danny a break!
If I hadn’t interviewed Danny at the end of “The Real World: Austin” filming in May, I might wonder if the Boston kid survived.
Last night’s episode of the MTV hit reality show found Danny having yet another really bad day. Remember, in the show’s second episode, Danny got into a fight on Sixth Street and broke a bone in his face. He had surgery in another episode and has been sporting an ice-pack and a sad demeanor ever since.
Last night Danny finally got his stitches out and made elaborate Valentine’s Day plans with squeeze Melinda. But cupid’s wings were clipped by bad news from home: Danny’s mother died.
This kid can’t catch a break. We know he does survive the series, but will he have to endure even more hardship along the way? I hope not. It’s time for sexist pig Wes to get his comeuppance.
January 28, 2005
Either cable viewers are acquiring better taste or pro wrestling is simply losing its luster.
For years, the top-rated program on basic cable was wrestling, whatever version was the most outrageous at the time. Today’s televised grunt-fest is “WWE Raw,” seen Monday nights on Spike.
(On broadcast TV, UPN has “WWE Smackdown” on Thursday nights, which also, thank heavens, is in a ratings slump.)
The top-rated cable show last week was the award-winning “Monk,” which airs at 9 p.m. Fridays on USA. I feel like high-fiving the cable-viewing public and telling them to keep it up!
Rounding out the Top 15 on the cable Nielsens were various installments of the daytime kid faves “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Fairly Odd Parents,” both on Nickelodeon, and reruns of NBC’s “Law & Order” on TNT.
I find it depressing when the most popular shows on TV are icky stuff like wrestling. And I find it encouraging when reality trash like “The Will,” which lasted only one week on CBS, definitively bombs.
I’m truly heartened that “Monk” is the top-rated show on basic cable, and the current broadcast Nielsen heavyweights include “CSI,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and “The West Wing.”
The taste of the American public has a direct impact on my professional life, not to mention my health and frame of mind. When the most popular shows are tasteless junk, more are bound to be coming, and that squeezes out any hope for the good stuff.
I have to watch it, good or bad, and, well, you should feel my pain when a half-dozen pilots come along that were clearly “inspired by” “My Wife and Kids” or “Fear Factor.” It’s excruciating.
Do I smell a whiff of a quality television trend? I’m holding my breath.
Ranch reality coming to PBS
It’s not the first time PBS has joined the reality craze, but it is the first time one has been steeped in Texas history.
“Texas Ranch House” will feature 20 participants ranching, roping and generally living life as American cowboys (and cowgirls) in the post-Civil War era. The eight-part series will film this summer at an undisclosed location in East Texas and is scheduled to air in spring 2006.
Executive producer Jody Sheff has said the show, which sounds similar to “Frontier House” and “Colonial House,” will dispel Hollywood’s often romantic stereotypes of life on the range.
If you have time to kill and want to live like a true citizen of the Old West, you can find applications and information about “Texas Ranch House” at www.pbs.org, beginning Tuesday.
June 25, 2004
Funny how buzz and critical babbling often have no correlation to Nielsen ratings. It’s a case of decibel level versus actual viewing. This seems to be especially true with cable, where independent-minded viewers have hundreds of choices and enjoy finding their own favorites.
Take the latest cable Nielsens, for example. The No. 1 program for the week ending June 20 was Rob Lowe’s two-part movie “Salem’s Lot,” which was mostly panned by critics and ignored in pop mainstream media outlets such as “Entertainment Tonight.” The TNT flick was seen in more than 4 million homes.
The week’s buzz and critical praise went to FX’s “Nip/Tuck.” Although difficult to watch at times due to the surgical gore, this series is the darling of critics (including me) for its intense drama and dark humor. But fewer than 2 million households tuned in for the Tuesday episode.
Other cable viewer favorites include the 15-year-old drama “Law & Order,” which has a gazillion reruns almost every night on TNT, and “WWE Raw Zone,” the pro wrestling extravaganza on Spike TV that is a favorite among certain segments of the macho population.
The return of USA’s “Monk” was the No. 2-rated cable program, and the neutered syndicated reruns of “Sex and the City” were a hit on TBS.
But Bravo’s brand-new reality show “Blow Out” was a bust even though just about every newspaper in the country gave it a positive nod.
Here’s the Cable Top 15 according to Nielsen Media Research: 1. ”Salem’s Lot” (4.02 million homes) 2. ”Monk” (3.91 million homes) 3. ”Law & Order” (3.41 million homes) 4. ”WWE Raw Zone” (3.31 million homes) 5. ”Sex and the City” (3.2 million homes) 6. ”Sex and the City” (3.01 million homes) 7. ”WWE Raw” (2.98 million homes) 8. ”Sex and the City” (2.89 million homes) 9. ”Law & Order” (2.83 million homes) 10. ”Sex and the City” (2.8 million homes) 11. ”SpongeBob SquarePants” (2.77 million homes) 12. ”Fairly Odd Parents” (2.75 million homes) 13. ”Law & Order” (2.74 million homes) 14. ”SpongeBob SquarePants” (2.72 million homes) 15. ”Real World XIV” (2.72 million homes)
