HBO FILM ABOUT SARAH PALIN A RATINGS HIT

The HBO film Game Change, which focuses on Sarah Palin’s role as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, chalked up the best ratings for the pay-TV channel for an original movie since 2004. Its initial airing on Saturday drew 2.1 million viewers. Three repeats added 1.3 million to the number. The Andrew Breitbart-founded conservative blog BigHollywood.com was unimpressed, calling the results a “ratings bust” and noting that Palin’s own series about her home state, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, debuted on TLC in 2010 with five million viewers. (The eight episodes averaged 3.5 million.) “Now, TLC isn’t a pay channel like HBO, but the tally still undermines the narrative that audiences were clamoring to see a Palin takedown,” the website said. The film received mostly positive reviews from newspaper TV critics, but was damned by Palin herself as inaccurate. However, in an interview with MSNBC this week, chief McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said, “I think it was very accurate. For all of us in the campaign, it really rang true.”