The Ratings of Summer, Wednesday

It's part 3 of my weeklong series on summer TV and the ratings it gets!

BROADCAST
ABC - The alphabet will mostly offer comedy repeats, but I'm throwing them on here just to note the burnoff of Happy Town during the month of June. Hitting even a mere 1.0 demo would be a minor miracle for that show, which I called arguably 2009-10's biggest bomb.

CBS
Big Brother - With CBS finally dumping comedies from Wednesday night in favor of reality mainstay Survivor, the net will also offer some summer reality at 8pm in Big Brother, starting July 14. This is another show that starts low and tends to pick up; after a few weeks in the low 2's last summer, the show eventually perked up into the mid- and sometimes upper 2's by summer's end.

NBC
Minute to Win It - This game show saw some regular season action on both Sundays and Wednesdays during the first half of 2010, and it will continue airing in the Wednesdays 8pm slot with a smattering of repeats and originals. The first 13-episode order averaged a 1.8 demo in originals.

America's Got Talent - Just copying what I said on the Tuesday post: This show is kinda like The Closer in that it's really considered to be the runaway number one master of its domain due to its big total viewer numbers, but in reality it's not far ahead of stuff like So You Think You Can Dance and Hell's Kitchen where it counts. That said, it's still a biggie, averaging a little over a 3.0 last summer and returning to a very healthy 3.6 on premiere night this year before dropping to a 2.9 the next night. This will continue to be the best thing NBC has going for them in the summer, by a long shot. (Not to mention better than quite a bit of what they have going for them in the fall...)

FOX
So You Think You Can Dance - 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
TBS - This net is home to a three-hour block of original comedy on Wednesday nights, starting with the flagship, Tyler Perry's House of Payne and ending with Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. Both of those shows have gotten in the 1.0 vicinity in recent runs, though Meet the Browns returned with an above-average 1.2 last week. In the middle at 9pm is Are We There Yet?, a newbie based loosely a couple Ice Cube movies, and it has a similar arrangement to the two Perry shows in that it will air this ten-episode order and then have an option for a "back nine-ty." Its premiere eps got a 1.2 and 1.3 last week. If it can settle down with similar ratings to the other two, look for plenty more of the show.

Bravo - Top Chef is one of the staple reality programs on basic cable, and it is certainly not attached to a certain part of the calendar; this will be its first summer season in three years. What limited info I have on that season indicates it usually got around a 1.0 demo, but subsequent seasons since then at other times of the year have done much better, like mid- to upper-1's better. So how this summer run does will be a bit of a mystery.

Other - Most of TNT and USA's original programming this summer comes in two-hour blocks, but both offer a standalone option on Wednesday night. For USA that's Psych, zany detective show and Mr. Spotupj favorite which averaged around a 1.2 demo in its brief move to Friday this winter following several years on Friday nights. It returns July 14. On TNT, it's Dark Blue, a pretty marginal second-season renewal by the net that averaged only a little over a 0.7 demo and saw that number drop to 0.6 when it lost the Leverage lead-in. It'll be back on August 4. And of course, a lot of eyes will be on the ratings for TV Land's Hot in Cleveland, starring Betty White and some other female faces of sitcoms past. That kicks off on June 16.