The Ratings of Summer, Friday/Saturday

It's part 5 of my weeklong series on summer TV and the ratings it gets!

FRIDAY
BROADCAST
ABC
The alphabet will continue to offer newsmagazine 20/20, which averaged about a 1.7 demo in the regular season but is likely to fall short of that most of the way this summer. As for other originals, that's unknown. Lots of TBA's for this net right now.

CBS
Flashpoint - Pretty much the only success to come out of all the broadcast scripted TV efforts in the last several years is Canadian co-production Flashpoint, which will return to a Friday night where it debuted and (after a brief move to Thursday) has played out a lot of episodes since. It returned with a 1.3 demo on June 4 but has done much better than that when given the support of original Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs on the same night. Still, look for this to remain in the low to middle 1's for this summer.

Miami Medical - As I said on Miami Medical's First Two Weeks post, when a show debuts on Friday nowadays, that means it's already pretty much out of favor with the network, and you have to do something great to transcend that situation. Miami Medical never did anything great, but it will run out the rest of its 13-episode order in the summer after Flashpoint. It returned with a 1.3 demo on June 4, which was actually better than some of its recent regular season results.

NBC
Friday Night Lights - The DirecTV-subsidized Friday Night Lights will continue to play out its last couple seasons on low-priority Friday nights during low-priority times of the year. The first five episodes of this season have averaged a 1.1 demo, but that's often been enough to win its virtually unwatched 8pm hour.

Dateline NBC - The reliable newsmagazine will continue to get low to middle 1's in the demo on Friday nights.

Fox
Fox was burning off drama Past Life on this evening but has pulled some scheduled airings of that to show encores of summer newbie The Good Guys. But Past Life may get scheduled again, and if so, look for it back on this night.

CABLE
Syfy - One of the last cable nets putting scripted stuff here, after USA's Monk ended and lead-out Psych left the night, Syfy will program small town dramedy Eureka at 9pm. The show's been around awhile but has managed to play almost all its episodes at times when ratings info was unavailable, so I know little about this show's ratings. Let's hope that ignorance will be erased this summer! Leading out of Eureka is new drama Haven.

SATURDAY
Of course, Fox will continue to serve up Cops and America's Most Wanted, but I'm only even including Saturday to note that CBS is first burning off medical drama Three Rivers, then going with Canadian co-production The Bridge. It hasn't aired one episode, so it's not exactly the same as the dump of canceled Three Rivers, but it's hard to call Saturday at 8/7c a good faith effort. Don't look for much out of this. On cable, it's original night for BBC America, mirroring how they do things across the pond. The net will finish out the Doctor Who season in the coming month and a half and then go with Being Human. But I don't know of anywhere to get ratings info on that net, so there's that.