The Ratings of Summer, Thursday

It's part 4 of my weeklong series on summer TV and the ratings it gets! I think I'm going to do a Friday post, but it'll be pretty short, because there are very few cable originals on the evening. So I'll try to finish up my Top 10 of 2009-10 post and get that up tomorrow as well.

BROADCAST
ABC
Rookie Blue - After over a year in development at ABC, the show formerly known as Copper will hit the sked on June 24. This is the first of three new scripted dramas that ABC will offer this summer, a co-production about rookie cops. Hate to be a broken record, but the odds of a summer scripted show working on broadcast are slim.

Boston Med - At 10pm, ABC will offer medical documentary Boston Med, which goes behind the scenes of some of Boston's finest hospitals. It's in the same vein as Hopkins, an ABC News documentary from the summer of 2008 that averaged a 1.6 demo and was very competitive with original scripted efforts on CBS (Swingtown) and NBC (Fear Itself).

CBS
Big Brother - One of CBS' three weekly nights of Big Brother airs on Thursday at 8/7c, leading into repeats of returning CSI and The Mentalist. As said on the Wednesday post, look for Big Brother to grow as the summer progresses.

NBC
100 Questions - When this show got the go-ahead at the upfront in 2009, people thought it might signal a return to the traditional comedies of the Must See TV days. However, after a slew of recastings and a switch to single-camera format (but still with a laugh track, like How I Met Your Mother), NBC thought so poorly of the finished product that they didn't even give it a regular season tryout after axing The Jay Leno Show and finding themselves with hours and hours of free real estate. It premiered to virtually zero promotion with a horrific 0.8 demo on May 27 and then shot up to a 0.9 the next week! Suffice to say it's going to have to climb a lot more to even get onto the fringes of the renewal discussion.

Fox
So You Think You Can Dance - Copying from the Wednesday post: One of the defining broadcast hits of the summer, SYTYCD got a regular season whirl in fall 2009 and didn't do very well, usually falling in the lower or middle 2's in the demo. But the summer is a different beast for this show; in summer of 2009 the show averaged a 3.0 demo and its first three airings this summer have also averaged a 3.0 demo. It should continue to be one of the top shows of the summer in the demo and likely broadcast TV's largest show in young female demos.

CABLE
USA - Cable on Thursday is defined by USA's two-hour block of Burn Notice and Royal Pains, still the network's strongest performers. Burn Notice averaged about a 1.9 last summer and Royal Pains about a 1.8, and they premiered last week about on par with those numbers. (2.0 and 1.8 respectively) All indications point to another fine summer on Thursday nights for USA Network.

MTV - I'm not a network exec, but if I were, the one thing that would make me sick is for something to catch absolute fire right as I run out of episodes because I gave it a shortened order. That happened to some extent with Undercover Boss on CBS, the reality smash hit that only had nine episodes before going away till fall, and it also happened to MTV's Jersey Shore, which had merely a nine-episode first season (plus a reunion) but had already risen from its modest 0.8 demo beginnings to a 2.6 A18-49 and a whooping 4.6 in W18-34 (blowing away everything on The CW) by the finale. Just about six months after the finale, MTV finally gets the show back on the air on July 29. It's a twelve-episode order this time, so a little better. ;-)

Other - Lots of cable nets air reality programming on Thursday nights, but I don't know anything about them or their ratings, so I won't feed you any BS. Of interest to some people will be the return of the animated show Futurama, back in originals on Comedy Central starting June 24.