The CW changes gears with 'Easy Money' and 'Valentine'

It may seem immodest to proclaim myself a prophet, and I'm certainly not going to demand any burnt offerings -- though I might suggest it politely -- but it's only fair (or megalomaniacal, if you want to split hairs) to point out something I wrote just about a year ago today. Noting the minuscule Nielsen ratings for The CW's three new Sunday programs rolled, I observed: "Networks cancel shows all the time, but The CW may be the first forced to cancel an entire night." Go ahead, I'll wait while you Google it.

Well, lo and behold, as we prophets are wont to say, that's exactly what happened. Online Nation, CW Now and Life Is Wild were all canceled within weeks, and soon after the network announced it would no longer program Sunday nights. Instead, the evening has been turned over to Media Rights Capital, the independent studio that produces Rita Rocks on Lifetime and Krod Mandoon on Comedy Central. So I guess slaughtering a few goats in my honor doesn't seem like such bad idea now, does it?

Interestingly, clairvoyance, money-changers and other trappings of divinity are all over the place as the new CW lineup debuts Sunday. You can read my full reviews of Easy Money and Valentine in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Fox's 'Fringe' gets a full season

Fringe, the heavily promoted Fox series from J.J. Abrams, at first looked like the major ratings disappointment of the fall season. But the numbers have been creeping upward in recent weeks, topping 10 million on Tuesday. And now Fox has extended Fringe to a full season, ordering nine more episodes. If NBC would just cancel Knight Rider, I'd say this was a good week's work.

Fox News wins another round in the ratings

Broadcast networks may rue the day they abandoned political coverage to the cable news nets. The quarterly ratings released Thursday show viewership soaring at at the cable news channels. Fox News in particular had a spectacular three months, the second-best quarter in the network's entire history. It averaged 1.2 million viewers throughout the day and 2.2 million during primetime hours, numbers that made it the fourth-most watched channel on basic cable.

Moreover, the viewers stuck around even after the broadcast nets began to add more political coverage after the party conventions ended. Fox News actually did better in September, finishing second in all of basic cable -- right behind ESPN and just ahead of the USA Network.

CNN averaged 1.3 million viewers during primetime and 713,000 throughout the day during the quarter, ninth in basic cable. Even the audience for 14th-place MSNBC -- 867,000 in primetime, 472,000 throughout the day -- looks pretty good compared to the numbers it was pulling three years ago, when during many time slots its ratings were almost too low for Nielsen to measure.

'Gossip Girl' and 'Chuck' and Hollywood fratricide

Network television is renowned for its lowlife treachery, but what happened Monday night took backstabbing to a new low. Josh Schwartz, the executive producer of NBC's Chuck, administered a vicious beating to....himself. The season debut of Chuck drew 6.6 million viewers, clobbering Schwartz's other show, The CW's Gossip Girl, which had an audience of just 3.5 million -- the series both air at 8 p.m. Schwartz reportedly left taunting messages for himself on his cellphone, and then, distraught, dumped a horse's head in his bed.

Final Nielsen numbers: The debate was a flop

The final Nielsen data is in, and Friday's presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain didn't bring in quite as many viewers as it appeared from preliminary results. About 52.4 million viewers (about 4.6 million than the overnight numbers suggested) watched on the four big broadcast networks, the two big Spanish nets, the three cable news channels, CNBC and BBC America.

That's well below the 62.5 million who watched the first debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004, and not even close to the 80.6 million who watched Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan square off on Oct. 28, 1980.

And considered another way -- by the percentage of American households who tuned in -- McCain and Obama were an absolute flop compared to previous presidential debates. Nielsen says 31.6 percent of U.S. homes were watching the debate. That's only about half as many as the 61 percent who tuned into the third Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960. If you compare just the first debates of the nine other election years in which the presidential candidates have squared off, McCain and Obama are tied for last with Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in 1996. 

The demise of 'Swingtown': Sex DOESN'T sell

The producers of the CBS wife-swapping drama Swingtown were hoping that cable would be a lifeboat for the show, but it turns out to have a sizable leak. The cable net Bravo has purchased the right to rerun the 13 episodes that CBS aired this summer, but says it has no intention of producing any new ones. That means Swingtown, which averaged fewer than five million viewers an episode (and just under 2.1 million in the 18-to-49 age demo advertisers like), is all but officially dead. No way that CBS will absorb the full production costs of a primetime show with that small an audience.

What the Swingtown producers were hoping for was a deal like the one NBC cut for Friday Night Lights, which last season had similar ratings and was on the network's chopping block despite a generally good critical reception. Friday Night Lights survived after satellite provider DirecTV kicked in some money for the first-run rights to the show. You can see the results, if you're a DirecTV subscriber, at 9 p.m. Wednesday when the show's third season starts -- on satellite only. NBC won't air the new episodes until February.

Any fears that the change of venue would alter the texture of Friday Night Lights have proven groundless. Wednesday's debut episode is indistinguishable in tone, substance and style from the show that's been airing on NBC. Of course, the story is moving along. The only missing series regular is Jason Street, the star quarterback who was paralyzed with an injury during the show's very first episode. Tami Taylor, the coach's wife, has been promoted from Dillon High's guidance counselor to principal. And a new quarterback, with a pushy football dad, has transferred in, making some waves on the team. In short, if you liked Friday Night Lights on NBC, you'll like it on DirecTV. In fact, you might like it better: The DirecTV episodes will air without commercials and will include bonus footage that makes the episodes slightly longer. (Wednesday's show, for instance, is about 50 minutes, eight minutes longer than the episodes that run on NBC.)

You can find Friday Night Lights on DirecTV's channel 101. You Swingtown fans can watch and dream about what might have been.

Debate audience: about 57 million

Preliminary Nielsen data from 55 cities where it operates so-called "people meters," set-top boxes that monitor television viewing, shows that a third of all TV sets were tuned into Friday night's debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. Nielsen won't release final data until Monday, but if the trend from the 55 metered markets holds steady, it would mean about 57 million people watched the debate.

The city with the highest percentage of viewers was St. Louis, where 52 percent of the TVs were tuned to the debate, reflecting either an inordinate civic-mindedness or a complete lack of actual lives, take your pick. The lowest was Phoenix, with only about 24 percent, which might mean that they're confident their guy McCain has already won, or that they're sick of him, take your pick again. South Florida was somewhere in the middle, with about 37 percent of the TVs on the debate.

Here's the complete list of Nielsen's metered markets. "Rating" means the percentage of all TV sets that were tuned to the debate; "share" is the percentage of TV sets that were actually in use that were tuned in.

'Knight Rider' is already running on empty

It had more promotional hype than all the rest of the new shows on NBC's fall schedule put together, but Knight Rider still pulled in just 7.3 million viewers to its Wednesday-night debut, limping to a dismal third-place finish in the slot behind ABC's Dancing With The Stars and Fox's Bones. That's less than half the audience that tuned in for a Knight Rider movie last spring. The NBC executives who commissioned a series on the basis of the ratings for that movie should have realized it had little competition in a spring schedule decimated by the Hollywood writers' strike.

I can't believe anybody who watched Knight Rider's debut Tuesday came away wanting more of a show that was basically a series of loud noises -- seriously, one of the worst hours of television I've ever had the misfortune to see. Watch the ratings sink from mediocre to awful in the second week, and sometime around the third you can start looking for Grim Nielsen Reaper.

'Worst Week' -- one night on the air and already it's on deathwatch

CBS and ABC just started their new fall seasons Monday night and already we have a strong candidate for the new season's first cancellation: Worst Week, a CBS sitcom unwisely swiped from the BBC. Given a prime spot in the CBS lineup, right after Two And A Half Men, Worst Week squandered 28 percent of its inherited audience. That's the kind of thing that makes a network executive's blood run cold, or colder. Worst Week's worst week could be coming soon.

Barack Obama's improbable double date, and how it ended

In a confounding Nielsen paradox Monday night, Barack Obama's interview with presumed enemy Bill O'Reilly had more than twice as many viewers as his interview with presumed pal Keith Olbermann. The two taped interviews aired head-to-head at 8 p.m. and O'Reilly's show on Fox News drew 4.6 million viewers compared to the 1.9 million who tuned into Olbermann's show on MSNBC.

Obama's decision to talk to O'Reilly has certainly paid off for both the candidate and Fox News. The first hour of the interview, which aired on Sept. 3, pulled in 6.6 million viewers and was O'Reilly's second-most-watched show of all time. By the time the third and final hour airs Wednesday, the interview will have been seen by something in excess of 13 million viewers -- a significant number of them, I'd guess, getting their first in-depth look at either Fox News or Obama.

Sarah Palin is a Nielsen hit

Whatever may happen in November, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was a winner Wednesday night, certified by none other than Nielsen Media Research. Her speech to the Republican National Convention drew 37.2 million viewers, a huge number for a night when the presidential candidate didn't speak -- and just one million fewer than watched Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination in Denver last week.

Fox News beat everybody, including all the broadcast nets, with 9.2 million viewers. NBC followed with 7.7 million, CNN 6.2 million, ABC 5.7 million, CBS 4.6 million and MSNBC 3.4 million.

Will cable throw 'Swingtown' a lifeline?

Swingtown, the CBS wife-swap drama with its neck on the Nielsen chopping block, is searching for a savior on cable television. Broadcasting & Cable reports that CBS Paramount Network Television, the studio that produces the show, is shopping it to cable in anticipation that it will be canceled when it finishes its season later this month. B&C acts as if Swingtown's cancellation is not a foregone conclusion -- saying the move to cable would take place "in the event the network does not renew it for a second season" -- but that's pure fantasy. CBS was plenty unhappy with the show's ratings back in July when it was averaging 6.7 million viewers per episode and dumped it off the Thursday schedule to Friday. Now the audience is less than half of that. Unless there's a cable deal, Swingtown is dead meat.

Dish Network dumps another channel; could 'Swingtown' be next?

The Dish Network has shed yet another channel. GolTV, a Spanish-language soccer net, got booted last week at the same time Dish was dumping the signals of four local Midwestern stations. As usual, the fight was about money -- that is, how much Dish had to pay to carry GolTV. At this rate, there might be nothing left on Dish's satellite service by Christmas except home shopping channels and porn. Not that there's anything wrong with cubic zirconium or naked people, you understand. Wait, somebody just handed me the ratings for Friday's episode of Swingtown -- just 4.3 million viewers, a new low. Okay. As I was saying, not that there's anything wrong with cubic zirconium.

An Emmy bonus for 'Mad Men': a million extra viewers

I usually scoff at claims that Emmy nominations or awards have any concrete effect on television shows, but Mad Men seems to be the rare exception. Sunday night's season premiere pulled in 1.9 million viewers -- hardly a staggering number, even by cable standards, but more than double the audience from the show's debut episode last summer. Only explanation I can think of: the 16 Emmy nominations, including one for best drama, that Mad Men picked up two weeks ago.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure Mad Men will be able to take full advantage of all those new viewers. Sunday night's episode was cryptic even by the standards of Mad Men, where the weekly scripts often seem to be isolated pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle. Not much happened, and there was little attempt to fill in the back story for a first-time viewer. For me, Mad Men's vivid, nuanced characters and extraordinary attention to period detail are more than enough to make up for the slow pace. But I'm not sure those million folks who tuned in for the first time Sunday night are going to agree.

'Swingtown' swirls gently down the drain

I'm not usually the kind of guy to say, "I told you so." Well, that's not exactly true. Actually, I am the kind of guy who delights in saying, "I told you so you and you were a fool to doubt me and you should be clubbed like a baby seal for it, imbecile!" So it is with malicious delight that I note Swingtown, the tepidly smarmy CBS series about '70s wife-swappers, has been all but officially buried by the network. Swingtown debuted in June with a robust audience of 8.6 million viewers. "My guess is a lot of the eyeballs drawn to Swingtown were there in search of the explicit sex the show seemed to promise and failed utterly to deliver," I noted at the time.

Guess what? The audience has steadily dwindled to 5.3 million, and now CBS has moved it from Thursday to Friday at 10 p.m., a slot ordinarily occupied by Topo Gigio reruns and old Pia Zadora movies. The peculiarly pointless Flashpoint, a cop show imported CBS from Canada, will move into Swingtown's old spot, but don't get too attached. Flashpoint lost more than a million viewers from its first episode to its second, and will soon be retired to the Canadian Cop Show Hall of Fame with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Strange stuff people watch on television

TV critics constantly run off at the keyboard about which shows will be successful and which will flop, but rest assured they never place any cash bets. That's because they know how obstinately audiences disregard not just quality but common wisdom and even past experience in choosing what to watch. Television viewers are like Mexican jumping beans on a remote control; turn on the set and they start hopping around and changing the channels in random directions.

For instance, the most profound programming certainty of the past decade has been that beauty pageants were a wheezing revenant of the archaeological past, just waiting for their coffin lids to slam closed for the final time. The Miss America contest was unceremoniously booted from ABC in 2004 after a long decline in audience bottomed out at 7 million viewers. Two hideous years on the country-music cable channel CMT, during which the audience dropped down to about 1.6 million viewers, only confirmed the obvious. This year Miss America went on the TV equivalent of life-support, hooking up with the minuscule cable channel TLC -- and promptly rebounded to 3.6 million viewers, a decent number for most cable nets and a whopper for TLC.

A fluke? Perhaps. But last weekend, the Miss Universe pageant pulled in 6.7 million viewers on NBC and another 2 million viewers on Spanish-language sister net Telemundo. The Telemundo number represented a startling 46 percent of all viewers tuned in to Spanish-language TV, and in several cities -- including Miami -- the contest was the top-ranked show of the night in both languages.

You can argue that there's always an audience for pretty girls in skimpy bathing suits, but how about cadaverous men pedaling bicycles? Who could possibly have predicted that the first 10 days of its Tour de France coverage would have brought nearly 21 million viewers to the little Versus cable channel? That's for a race with nobody slamming into walls at 190 mph and from which Ashley Judd is conspicuously absent.

Most perplexing of all was the ratings performance of Flashpoint, a tepid Canadian cop drama that CBS bought to fill dead time on Friday nights. With 8.1 million viewers, it finish 15th in the Nielsens last week, ahead of not only House but even the hallowed Celebrity Family Feud. Is nothing sacred to you people?

The successful life of 'Army Wives'

Not yet halfway through its second season, Army Wives has been picked up for a third. The drama was Lifetime's all-time ratings champ in its first season and has continued to grow. The opening episode of the second season last month drew the biggest audience in Lifetime's history; the second scored the highest in network history in the demographic that the network targets, women 25-54. Army Wives keeps drawing more than 4 million viewers a week and has jumped Lifetime's website traffic 1,200 percent.

'Swingtown' ratings: sex sells -- once, anyway

You evil, defiant viewers disregarded my advice in droves and tuned in to CBS' wife-swapping drama Swingtown Thursday night in big numbers -- bigger, anyway, than those for NBC's superior horror anthology Fear Itself. Swingtown pulled in an audience of 8.6 million, compared to just 5.2 million for Fear Itself. (The night's real winner was the NBA championship game on ABC, which averaged 10.5 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour when Swingtown and Fear Itself debuted.) My guess is a lot of the eyeballs drawn to Swingtown were there in search of the explicit sex the show seemed to promise and failed utterly to deliver. It will be very interesting to see how many of them return next week.

Univision si, The CW no

How bad was the 2007-2008 season for The CW? Bad enough that it finished behind Spanish-language network Univision. Well, let's make that "got clobbered by Univision." The Spanish net averaged an audience of 3.5 million viewers, a whopping 44 percent more than The CW's 2.5 million. In the 18-to-34 age bracket that The CW supposedly targets, it was even worse: Univision's audience was 64 percent bigger.

In fact, maybe this item is really about Univision's growing strength rather than The CW's weakness. The English-language nets talk about attracting younger viewers, but Univision actually does it: The combined 18-to-34 audience of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW) was down by 14 percent this season, while Univision's was up 2 percent. When the industry talks about the Big Five nets these days, Univision ought to be one of the five.

A big sweeps victory for WPLG

The May Nielsen sweeps ended this week, and it's party time at WPLG-ABC 10. Not only did the station have South Florida's top-rated 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts (sending Dwight Lauderdale, who retired Wednesday night after 23 years in the anchor chair, out on top), but seven of the top 10 prime shows air on WPLG. The station's spell over viewers was so total that even mean old Judge Judy on WPLG whupped that sweet Oprah Winfrey on WFOR-CBS 4 in their head-to-head battle at 4 p.m.

Ratings worries at 'American Idol'

American Idol is, for the first time, showing a little bit of Nielsen wear-and-tear. Though the show is still the biggest thing on TV, averaging about 29 million viewers per show, that figure is down 7 percent from last season. And the slippage gains significance when you consider that Idol this season has mostly aired against reruns and tepid reality shows thrown together to fill airtime emptied by the Hollywood writers' strike.

Executives at Fox, where the entire schedule is built around Idol, have taken note. The trade journal Broadcasting & Cable reported Monday that the network is circulating a marketing survey to viewers asking about potential changes to the show, including tinkering with the audition episodes, expanding -- or contracting -- the role of Ryan Seacrest, and of course just how much of Idol's bilious and/or airheaded judges anybody wants to see. For instance, viewers are asked how strongly they agree with the statement, "I watch American Idol mostly to hear what Paula has to say." More sensible might have been, "I watch American Idol mostly to see if Paula will pass out face-down in her 'Coke' cup." Or, "I want American Idol mostly to guess which contestant(s) Paul has slept with."

Oprah's big Nielsens

Some critics may not have liked it, but Oprah's Big Give was a huge success Sunday night, drawing 15.6 million viewers -- probably the biggest single audience outside of American Idol or the Super Bowl since original programming began disappearing from television about a month into the Hollywood writers' strike. It will be interesting to see if the audience comes back for a second episode next week.

Oscar ratings: a disaster

All those efforts to end the Hollywood writers' strike before it jeopardized the Oscar ceremony were for naught, or at least, not very much. The preliminary ratings for Sunday night's telecast indicated it drew the smallest audience ever -- down 14 percent from the 2003 ceremony, until now the least-watched. The preliminary ratings were down 21 percent from last year.

'Jericho' gets bombed in the ratings

The seeming stroke of luck that left CBS' post-apocalyptic drama Jericho in a position to flex its muscles, returning for a second season against competition of lame reruns backfired badly Tuesday night. The show drew just 7.2 million viewers, getting beaten by reruns of ABC's Boston Legal and NBC's Law & Order: SVU. The audience was also far smaller than the 11.7 million viewers Jericho drew in its 2006 debut, suggesting that the eyeballs that left the show when it went on a three-month Christmas break last season aren't coming back.

Dick Clark still reigns on New Year's Eve

He only appeared for a few minutes, speaks with some difficulty, and certainly will never be called "the world's oldest teenager" again. But Dick Clark is still the King of New Year's Eve. His ABC special from New York drew an average audience of more than 18 million viewers, 29 percent more than the audience for competing shows on NBC and Fox combined.

Dave Letterman strikes back

The first shows to go dark when Hollywood's writers went on strike were the late-night variety programs. Viewers soon grew bored with reruns, and a couple of weeks ago, ABC's Nightline won the late-night ratings battle for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. Last week it happened a second time -- and suddenly the late-night hosts are getting a little worried. One result: CBS is now billing next week's collection of David Letterman reruns as a "best of" series -- "the most memorable appearances by Letterman's favorite women." They include reruns of shows with Madonna, Cher, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Drew Barrymore.

UPDATE: Worry may be turning to panic. Variety reports that Letterman and other late-night hosts are getting ready to return to work.

Low ratings for CNN's 'Heroes'

A common complaint about the news media is that it overlooks good news in favor of bad. But showcasing the former certainly didn't pay off for CNN. Its heavily promoted four airings of Heroes last week, which spotlighted people with extraordinary accomplishments chosen by viewers, all tanked. The most successful edition, on Dec. 6, drew less than 600,000 viewers and ranked as the No. 71 show on cable news nets for the week.

A news victory for NBC

NBC's Brian Williams took a lot of criticism for hosting Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks ago. But viewers responded. With an average of 9.22 million viewers per newscast last week, the NBC Nightly News had its biggest audience of the past nine months -- and edged out Charlie Gibson's ABC newscast for the first time in several weeks.

One version of the fall season's winners and losers

The Nielsen ratings for the new fall season shows are still shaking out (though in three cases -- Nashville, Online Nation and Viva Laughlin, the operative words is "out"). But E! Online gossip columnist Kristin polled her readers to see what they'd like to save and what they'd like to sink.

The good news for her readers is that four of their top five -- ABC's Pushing Daisies and Samantha Who?, The CW's Gossip Girl and NBC's Chuck -- have already gotten orders for additional episodes from their networks. The fifth, ABC's Big Shots, is looking a little shaky.

At the other end of the scale, it's a mirror-image story -- four of the least-favored shows (CBS' Viva Laughlin and Kid Nation, ABC's Cavemen and Fox's K-Ville) have either been canceled or are in serious trouble. The fifth, CBS' Cane, has gotten an order for additional episodes. Interesting that three of the five belong to CBS; television's top-rated network had the weakest fall development.

Muera Laughlin -- it's gone

CBS' eccentric musical drama Viva Laughlin debuted Thursday with 8.4 million viewers -- a small audience that looks even smaller when you realized that the show lost 40 percent of the audience it inherited from CSI. On Sunday Viva Laughlin moved to its regular time slot on Sunday and pulled even fewer viewers, 6.8 million. What must really have give CBS programmers the cold sweats was that 1.6 million switched channels midway through the show. I'd say Viva Laughlin looks like a good bet for the season's third cancellation, joining Fox's Nashville and The CW's Online Nation in unmarked graves on the studio backlots.

UPDATE: A couple of hours after I posted this, CBS pulled the plug -- Viva Laughlin has been canceled.

Another one bites the dust

Online Nation, The CW's show of Internet video clips, has been canceled after three episodes and ratings so low that Nielsen computers went blind trying to measure them. The network will move reruns of its sitcom Aliens In America in the Sunday 7:30 p.m. time slot.

Quick as the hook was for Online Nation, it's not the first show of the 2007 season to go down. Fox yanked Nashville after two episodes, and while its cancellation has never been officially announced, don't threaten to hold your breath until its return unless you've got your will in order. Fox has also yet to formally cancel its murder-mystery serial Pasadena, which left the air in October 2001. Apparently if you admit defeat over there, Rupert Murdoch chops off one of your toes and feeds it to his dogs.

UPDATE: Fox has finally admitted it: Nashville is officially, totally and eternally dead. The show's seven viewers are reportedly distraught.

Not so fast, dino-breath

For days, ABC has been running ads taunting TV critics for the high ratings for last week's debut episode of Cavemen. Guess what? The audience for Tuesday's second episode was down 31 percent. It dropped to fourth place in its time slot, below even its ABC follow-up, Carpoolers. Seems several million people tuned in last week to see if the show was as awful as the critics said and decided: It is.

A bigger person would stop this item right now....but not me, I dare to be small. Hey ABC: Nyah-nyah-nyah, we told you so!

The TiVo Top 10

Among the zillion-and-one television statistics generated by the Nielsen folks is a list of the top that people watched not live but on TiVo or some other digital recording device (within the first seven days after broadcast). It differs significantly from the regular Nielsen ratings top 10, and it's hard to know exactly why. Is there some particular reason that cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy should do so well in TiVo households? And Kid Nation -- are kids secretly setting the recorder to watch the show when their parents aren't looking? I'm not sure, and I don't know if anyone else is, either. Anyway, here's the list for the week of Sept. 17:

1. Survivor: China (CBS, season premiere): 2.12 million

2. Family Guy (Fox, season premiere): 1.84 million

3. Prison Break (Fox, season premiere): 1.55 million

4. Back To You (Fox, premiere): 1.46 million

5. Come Rain/Come Shine (ABC): 1.26 million

6. Big Brother - Tuesday episode (CBS, season finale): 1.25 million

7. The Simpsons (Fox, season premiere): 1.09 million

8. Kid Nation (CBS, premiere): 1.01 million

9. K-Ville (Fox, premiere): 993,000

10. Shark (CBS, season premiere); 982,000

   

The 411 on 'Gossip Girl' is good

Its ratings have been mediocre, or even a little less than that. Nonetheless, The CW has just picked up teen drama Gossip Girl for a full season, meaning it will be with us at least until May.

Coming soon to The CW's Sunday-night lineup: America's funniest test patterns

Networks cancel shows all the time, but The CW may be the first forced to cancel an entire night. Sunday's debut of the dippy family drama Life is Wild drew just 1.64 million viewers, which is perfectly awful compared to anything else on network television....except The CW's other Sunday night shows. CW Now, its even lighter-weight version of Entertainment Tonight. had a mere 852,000 viewers; Online Nation, its pointless review of Internet videos, an almost immeasurably low 762,000.

The renewal of 'Tell Me You Love Me' and other mysteries

From the Department of Perplexing Programming Decisions comes a bulletin that HBO has renewed its short-on-thought-but-long-on-sex series Tell Me You Love Me. Though less than a million viewers tuned in for the debut, HBO claims that when you add in all the 3 a.m. airings across its various channels (HBO 2, HBO Signature, HBO Mars, etc.), the show is drawing 3.1 million sets of eyeballs per episode. Maybe. More like, I think, is that HBO's tank is empty. Its new series over the past couple of years have ranged from the weird (John From Cincinnati) to the stupid (Lucky Louie) to the downright inexplicable (Flight Of The Conchords). Even the shows with broader appeal (Rome in 2005, Big Love in 2006) are solid performers rather than the watercooler-buzz material of The Sopranos or Sex And The City. The slogan "It's not TV, it's HBO" is taking on a whole new meaning.

Meanwhile, Showtime is rolling out exquisitely crafted shows like Dexter, The Brotherhood, Weeds and Californication. At some point, the viewers are going to start finding them.

On the other hand, they like 'Cavemen,' too

ABC's Cavemen, unquestionably the most critically reviled new show of the fall season, pulled in 9 million viewers for its Tuesday debut. That's not great for a show on one of the Big Four broadcast networks, but Cavemen tied for the top spot in its time slot for viewers in the coveted 18-to-49 demographic.

They LIKE us! They really LIKE us!

Nothing warms America's heart like the murder, mayhem and sociopathology of everyday life in Miami. I can say without fear of contradiction that our serial killers are the best-loved serial killers in America. (Overseas, we still face stiff competition from Osama bin Laden.) Dexter's season debut on Showtime Sunday night drew more than a million viewers, up 67 percent from last year and Showtime's most successful season premiere of the past three years. Kinda makes you wonder why nobody ever thought to give Ted Bundy a reality show.

The first casualty in war is truth, even at PBS

On Sept. 26, I reported that the opening night of the documentary series The War was a hit "not just by PBS standards, but anybody's."

The opening episode of Ken Burns' documentary drew 15.5 million viewers -- 18.7 million if you count the audience for the 10:30 p.m. repeat. (In cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle, more than 15 percent of the televisions in use were tuned to The War.) The Sopranos, by contrast, drew around 13 million at the show's height.

It turns out that PBS was spinning Nielsen numbers just like those corrupt, money-grubbing swine at the commercial networks -- except even more dramatically. PBS was using a ridiculous number known in television as "the cume," or cumlative viewers -- it counted anybody who tuned in for six minutes as a viewer. When you switch to the standard television measurement, the average audience -- that is, the number of people who were tuned in at any given moment -- The War's audience drops to 7.3 million. Oops. Hey, do you suppose that the conscience of the nation Bill Moyers will do a show exposing PBS' statistical tap-dance? Ha ha. But give PBS ombudsman Mike Getler credit for doing just that.

Going, going...

Kid Nation -- or, as it's known in the CBS catacombs, Child Abuse For Fun And Profit -- took a tumble in the ratings Wednesday night, losing about 20 percent of an audience that wasn't very big to begin with. The show's second episode had just 7.6 million viewers, down from 9.38 million from last week's debut. And CBS executives with a memory for ratings -- that is, all of them -- will not fail to note that the nuclear-apocalypse drama Jericho, pulled in 11.7 million viewers in the same timeslot a year ago. It's not like there's a lot of water-cooler buzzer about which kid won a gold star Wednesday that's going to bring a tidal wave of new viewers. I'd say this time next week CBS will be contemplating whether it wants Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres reruns in Kid Nation's timeslot.

UPDATE: I've heard of spin doctoring, but this is simply amazing, or maybe pathetic. I just got a press release from CBS bragging that Wednesday's Kid Nation was the second most watched show of the night among children aged 2 to 11. By next week, CBS will be boasting it was first among parakeets and second among household pets overall.

The Nielsen folks say I was wrong -- that was a very good war indeed

The War is a hit not just by PBS standards, but anybody's. The opening episode of Ken Burns' documentary drew 15.5 million viewers -- 18.7 million if you count the audience for the 10:30 p.m. repeat. (In cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle, more than 15 percent of the televisions in use were tuned to The War.) The Sopranos, by contrast, drew around 13 million at the show's height. Thanks to my pal Marc Berman at Media Week for ferreting out the numbers.

Ratings: Good news and bad news

Apparently America has been longing for a co-host who doesn't know if the world is round or flat. Sherri Shepherd's debut on The View gave the show its highest rating since May and were up 16 percent over the same date a year ago.

On the other hand, Fox's terminally stupid unreality show Nashville edged closer to the grave Friday. The small audience of 2.7 million viewers for its first episode shrank to a minuscule 2.2 million for its second. The next sound you hear will be the plug being pulled.

Mad about 'Mad Men'

Summer on broadcast television is the season of cheapie reality shows and brain-dead burnoffs that were too crummy to make the fall schedule. But executives at basic-cable channels are learning that it's a great time to showcase original dramas that might get lost amid all the hubbub of the broadcasting season.

The summer's three best new shows were all basic-cable originals -- FX's Damages, Lifetime's Army Wives, and AMC's Mad Men. Army Wives has already been renewed for a second season, and now AMC -- basking in the critical acclaim, big audiences and lush demographics (a third of the viewers had annual family incomes over $100,000) generate by Mad Men -- has followed suite: The smart show about advertising men of the 1960s got picked up on Monday.

I TOLD you the Emmys were boring

The preliminary data from Nielsen show that Sunday's Emmy telecast had the smallest audience since 1990. Just over 13 million viewers watched the Emmys, down 19 percent from last year. And the show even got beat by the NFL game on NBC -- at least 13.3 million and probably a lot more watched the Chargers and the Patriots.

Who let the dogs out?

Here's a review of Fox's new cop drama K-Ville, which is so awful that I've expected it to be the first show canceled this fall. But I could be wrong -- another crummy Fox show that debuted Friday, the pseudoreality Nashville, which drew a paltry 2.7 million viewers and was beaten by such dreary fare as a rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos. Worse yet, it squandered nearly half the audience from its lead-in, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? That's the kind of thing that sends chills through the hearts of network programmers. Another outing like that one and Nashville could be gone by this time next week.

Mommy went to Iraq and Syria and all I got was lousy Nielsens

Katie Couric's trip to the Middle East resulted in the worst ratings of the CBS Evening News in at least the past 20 years, averaging less than 5.5 million viewers apiece. The irony is that the newscasts she did from Syria and Iraq were really pretty good, a deft mix of in-depth reports and oddball but interesting features -- for instance, on the last village in the world where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is spoken. You've got to wonder, at this point, if there's anything she can do to bring the viewers back. They didn't like gimmicks, and they don't appear to be responding to good reporting, either.

Anchor away

Katie Couric can breathe a little easier -- to everybody's surprise, America does not want to see female wrestlers in the anchor chair. The Fox reality show Anchorwoman, with WWE wrestling vixen Lauren Jones taking over as anchor at a small East Texas station, has been unceremoniously canceled after a single episode. Despite all the hype for the show -- including several million screechy journalism-is-ruined columns by panicky newspeople -- the premiere episode drew only 2.7 million viewers.

Even in this day of quick network trigger fingers, getting canceled after a single episode is quite an achievement -- it's only happened 10 times before in broadcast network history. My pal Marc Berman at Media Week has thoughtfully compiled a list of these truly brain-dead shows:

ABC

Emily's Reasons Why Not (2006)

Turn-On (1969)

CBS

Co-Ed Fever (1979)

Public Morals (1996)

South of Sunset (1993)

The Will (2005)

You're In the Picture (1961)

Fox

Lawless (1997)

The Rich List (2006)

Who's Your Daddy (2005)

The undisputed champ of this list of video Titanics is Turn-On, a Laugh-In ripoff that so generated so many enraged phone calls from viewers and affiliates that ABC canceled it halfway through the only episode. And You're In The Picture deserves a special mention, too: A game show hosted by Jackie Gleason, it was so appalling that Gleason came on the air the following week and spent a half-hour apologizing for it.

   

Nothing Mickey Mouse about these numbers

All that hype for High School Musical 2, it turns out, wasn't hype at all. The Disney Channel's movie drew 17.2 million viewers Friday, breaking the previous record for basic-cable audiences by more than 1 million. And a lot of those folks stuck around for the rest of the night. An episode of Hannah Montana following HSM2 had nearly 11 million viewers, and the Miley Cyrus episode after that still had 8 million pairs of eyes glued to the tube. So guess which network won the basic-cable ratings sweepstakes for the week?

UPDATE: If you missed HSM2, you get another shot on Thursday, when the Disney Channel plays it again at 8 p.m.

Who would have guessed? Sex and drugs build ratings

Monday was a big night for Showtime. The debut episode of dope comedy Weeds was up 43 percent from last season's premiere and was the show's most watched episode ever. And the debut of Californication, in which David Duchovny had sex approximately every five and a half minutes, was the biggest premiere of a Showtime comedy since 2001. In fact, my theory is that Duchovny is going to boink at least one member of every Nielsen family in America during Californication as part of a new Showtime ratings strategy, which it desperately needs. Regardless of how good Monday night's performance was in terms of percentages and historical comparisons, the raw numbers -- 824,000 for Weeds, 550,000 for Californication -- are abysmally low. HBO's Flight Of The Conchords averaged better than either of those shows, with just under a million viewers, and is floating on the cancellation bubble, which gives you an idea of how the two networks' audiences compare. 

Duchovny poses with an apple that he did not have sex with in the opening episode of Californication.

Reports of the sitcom's death may be slightly premature

Here's a list of most-watched syndicated TV shows last week, courtesy of (or, to use technical journalism terms, ripped off from) my pal Marc Berman, who loves to curl up in bed each night with a thrilling Nielsen report:

1. Wheel of Fortune

2. Jeopardy

3. Oprah

4. Judge Judy

5. (tie) Entertainment Tonight and CSI: Miami

7. (tie) Seinfeld, Dr. Phil, Friends, Wheel of Fortune/weekend and Seinfeld/weekend.

Note the presence in the top 11 of Friends, which hasn't shot a new episode since 2004, and Seinfeld (twice!), which hasn't shot one since 1998. Next time you hear someone saying sitcoms don't work on television anymore, mentally insert the word bad at the beginning of the phrase. TV still has plenty of viewers hungry enough for funny sitcoms to watch shows they've already seen 10 or 12 times.

Not quite so mad about 'Men'

Much as I liked the show, I was a little surprised when the heroic admen of the '60s drama Mad Men pulled in 1.6 million viewers -- a giant audience for a cable channel like AMC -- for its debut a couple of weeks ago. Could it be the secret dream of American television viewers has long been to watch guys smoke, get loaded during business meetings and check out their secretaries' butts? Apparently not. The audience was down to just over a million viewers for the second episode, which is still a very respectable number for AMC. And like* I said, I'm a big fan of Mad Men, which has fascinating characters to go with the all the frat-boy antics and is also a fascinating window into a forgotten era of American history. But still.

*One of the cool things about writing a blog is that none of my bosses read it. If they did, you can be sure that a pack of copy editors, yapping like preposition-phobic hyenas, would have wrestled that like to the ground and changed it to as. But here, in my forgotten little corner of the Internet, I can say anything I want. Like [censored] or [censored] or even [CENSORED]. Coming soon, my 137-part series on the secret sex lives of McClatchy executives.

Hey, where's MacNeil and Lehrer?

Viewers were apparently underwhelmed by the idea of watching fake Vikings and subtitled cats asking questions of presidential candidates. Despite massive hype (including just a wee bit by this guy), Monday night's YouTube/CNN hybrid debate had a smaller audience than a traditional Democratic debate last month on CNN. The June debate drew 2.74 million viewers, while Monday's pulled in 2.55 million. That's a 6 percent decline. Sounds like debate organizers won't be doing away with panels of journalists any time soon.

Fox News wins again

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann may be getting all the hype, but Fox News is still getting the viewers. With the Nielsen numbers just in for the year's second quarter, Fox average 1.46 million viewers during prime time -- more than CNN (756,000) and MSNBC (462,000) combined. You can even reasonably argue that Fox News' competitors are no longer the other news channels, but basic cable's entertainment networks -- Fox News was the fourth-most-watched basic cable net in prime time during the quarter. CNN was 25th.

Musical anchor chairs

One of those periodic shuffles at CNN is under way, with an assist from CBS. Earlier this week, CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield left CNN to return to CBS. Now CNN is about to dump the anchors of its American Morning newscast, Miles O'Brien and Soledad O'Brien, for John Roberts and Kiran Chetry. Roberts left CBS last year when he didn't get Dan Rather's anchor spot; Chetry joined CNN two months from Fox News, because she was denied an anchor slot on the morning Fox & Friends newscast (Fox's story) or because it was time for a change (hers).

Chetry and Roberts might not want to get too comfortable in their new chairs. All those various O'Briens took over American Morning just two years ago, when CNN ousted Bill Hemmer for failing to mount a ratings challenge to Fox News. Now they've suffered the same fate for the same reason. Meanwhile, the big winner in all this is...me. I will now get approximately 7,432 less pieces of mail a year asking, "Are Miles O'Brien and Soledad O'Brien married?", thus freeing up valuable time to work on my book about Paula Abdul's theory of the origins of the universe.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: CNN's Lou Dobbs is also joining CBS, sort of: He's not leaving CNN, but will contribute pieces to The Early Show on CBS, a reponse to all those viewers who wrote in asking for some bellowing about illegal aliens to go with their breakfasts.

Go figure

The premiere of The Tudors, Showtime's worst drama in years, drew its top ratings of the past 36 months. Between its 10 p.m. debut and its 11 p.m. repeat, about 1.3 million people watched the show Sunday night. Never underestimate the value of pretty costumes, I guess.

Let's just hope there are no hanging chads

It's not likely to work, but you've got nothing to lose, except possibly a case of carpal tunnel syndrome if you vote too many times. The E! Online website is offering a platform called SOS: Save One Show, where you can vote for the ratings-impair broadcast network series you'd most like to see back next fall. There are 17 different shows on the ballot, everything from Six Degrees to Supernatural, and E! Online columnist Kristin Veitch "will do her best to persuade network executives to pick up the highest voted show for another season."

I can assure you that Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves are about as likely to stand on their heads naked and eat a bug on Kristin Veitch's say-so as to keep a show they want to cancel. The networks don't care about what she or any other TV writer (including, astonishingly, me) thinks. For that matter, they don't care what you think either, only what you watch, and if the numbers aren't there, they aren't there.

The single possible exception to this ironclad rule might be The CW, where the audience is so infinitesimal that the mild publicity buzz generated by a commuted death sentence for a show on the ratings bubble like Veronica Mars or Gilmore Girls might add enough viewers to make it worthwhile for the network. Of the five shows Veitch claims to have saved with past campaigns, four -- One Tree Hill, Veronica Mars, Roswell and Angel -- were on UPN or The WB, the networkettes from which The CW was formed.

Some of the shows on Veitch's ballot are ringers (I don't think anybody believes that Scrubs is in serious danger of cancellation) and others are already dead meat. (Six Degrees and The Nine are not coming back to ABC next season unless you've got pictures of ABC programming boss Stephen McPherson cavorting naked with Donald Duck's underage nephews.) But a click or two for Supernatural or Veronica Mars couldn't hurt.

March Nielsen Madness

In the mid-1980s, when ESPN first began telecasting the early rounds of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, the only madness