Demos Year to Year, Thursday 2/4/10

Yes, it's the return of my regular year-to-year comparisons. I'm gonna do the posts for February sweeps and compare them to last year's March sweeps. The reason I only do these posts during sweeps periods is because those are usually the times when you can count on original programming, and I don't want to get mired down in a lot of original-vs.-repeat comparions, but during the wonky March sweeps of 2009 that was devised to get around the digital conversion (which ended up getting delayed from February anyway), there were actually a lot of reruns running around. The February vs. March thing is also going to suck in a couple other cases, since a lot of unscripted shows will be at different points in the season and the Winter Olympics will be in the mix for more than half of the period.

To see how rough this will be, all you have to do is look at this post, where there are a mere three same show, same timeslot comparisons. So I'll have to bite the bullet here a lot of the time, but hopefully something useful will come out of it.

(The Deep End vs. Ugly Betty) -24%
(Grey's Anatomy vs. Grey's (R)) +181%
(Private Practice vs. Private (R)) +154%

(Surviving Survivor special vs. Survivor) -37%
CSI -40%
(The Mentalist vs. Eleventh Hour) +14%

(Community vs. My Name is Earl) +5%
(Parks and Recreation vs. Kath & Kim) +28%
The Office -16%
30 Rock -22%
(The Jay Leno Show vs. ER) -68%

(Bones vs. American Idol) -57%
(Fringe vs. Hell's Kitchen) -41%

(The Vampire Diaries vs. Smallville (R)) +138%
(Supernatural vs. Supernatural (R)) +38%