IDOL KEEPS FALLING

Fox’s American Idol remained the highest-rated show on television on Wednesday and Thursday, but its numbers were down by nearly 30 percent from a year ago. Thursday’s telecast, which drew 16.99 million total viewers, was actually beaten by CBS’s The Big Bang Theory among viewers 18-49, Idol‘s primary target demo. Among total viewers, the CBS [...]

IDOL‘S RATINGS SINK AGAIN

As it did on Wednesday, the audience for Thursday night’s edition of American Idol shrank significantly, down a whopping 27 percent from the season’s second episode a year ago. It nevertheless remained the most-watched show of the night, attracting 17.7 million viewers. But a new episode of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory was breathing down [...]

CBS A HIT ON THURSDAY EVEN WITH RERUNS; NBC COLLAPSES

All of the broadcast networks aired reruns Thursday night, with CBS far in the lead in every half hour of primetime among both total adults and 18-49 year-olds, according to Nielsen Media Research. Its 8:00 p.m. comedy The Big Bang Theory actually drew 10.2 million viewers, nearly as many as those watching all of the [...]

CBS BECOMES THE NEW “MUST SEE TV” ON THURSDAYS

As far as the Nielsen ratings go, CBS’s Thursday-night comedy lineup clearly has become the equivalent of what NBC used to call Must See TV for the same night. And its 10:00 drama The Mentalist is the equivalent of NBC’s onetime powerhouse ER. Rarely, since NBC’s glory days, has a network dominated on a single [...]

NOBODY WATCHES TV ON SATURDAY — WANNA BET?

Who says there’s no audience for television shows on Saturdays? Demonstrating that massive numbers will tune in if they’re given something appealing to watch, CBS’s college football telecast — LSU vs. Alabama — attracted 20.01 million viewers, making it the highest-rated college football game since 2006. To be sure, NBC’s Sunday Night Football ranked higher. [...]

X FACTOR, BONES AID FOX FOLLOWING SERIES

With the World Series out of the picture, ratings for network programs returned to normal Thursday night. Fox’s The X Factor returned to the top at 8:00 p.m. with a results episode that drew 11.7 million viewers (virtually identical to Wednesday’s performance episode). That helped boost ratings for the season debut of Bones, which followed [...]

OUT-OF-THE-PARK RATINGS FOR SERIES’ 6TH GAME

A high-scoring, 11-inning sixth game of the World Series averaged 19.7 million viewers Thursday night, according to preliminary overnight ratings. (The number is expected to climb when final results are released.) The game lasted until 12:45 a.m. Eastern Time, but early results suggest that many, if not most, viewers hung on until the last out [...]

WORLD SERIES DOMINATING TV VIEWING

Although final ratings figures are not yet available, it would appear from early results that the first two games of this year’s World Series attracted about the same number of viewers that the first two games of last year’s did — about 13 million. On each night the game was No. 1 in the ratings [...]

THURSDAY NIGHT: VIEWERS CAME, SAW, LEFT

Thursday night — which generally draws more television viewers than any other night of the week — saw a big drop in viewers versus the first Thursday night of the season last week. In particular, Fox’s The X Factor saw its numbers drop 12 percent from last Thursday, while NBC’s Whitney plummeted 24 percent and [...]

X FACTOR: AUDIENCES PREFER THE ORIGINAL

Like the series premiere on Wednesday, the second night of Simon Cowell’s The X Factor produced good ratings for Fox on Thursday, but they were well below the network’s — and TV columnists’ — expectations and about half of those for American Idol. For the first 90 minutes of the two-hour telecast, they failed to [...]

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