Premiere Ratings: Hawaii Five-0, The Event, Lone Star, Mike & Molly, Chase

As they'd say on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I got a little "jammed up" so I couldn't finish this quite as soon as I hoped. But let me be the last to offer some quick thoughts on the premiere Monday prelims. Will do a more numbers-licious post based on the finals later on:

• The premiere of CBS' Hawaii Five-0 came in significantly below the 5.0 demo that I long-windedly predicted, but a 3.8 is still a solid start. It's a little over a half point below last year's NCIS: LA premiere and a half-point below last year's CSI: Miami season premiere, but it's still going to have a chance to stick around for a long time. If it takes the typical 20%+ drop for a remake, though, things might get a little shaky.

• The Event's 3.7 demo apparently may drop in finals due to football preemptions, but as it stands now it's just a tick off my 3.8 prediction, and still easily the net's best drama premiere since premiere Wednesday in 2007. There are people calling this a disappointment, but I disagree because the net has had so much trouble premiering any drama whatsoever. Southland, long-groomed as the spirtual successor to ER, managed just a 3.2. And their two fall dramas of last year got just a 2.3 and a 2.2! And The Event pulled this out without any real lead-in support; Chuck returned to a 2.1 demo at 8/7c.

• It doesn't take a genius to know that my favorite pilot of the fall, Lone Star, was totally DOA. But what's amazing is just how DOA.  The 1.3 demo is lower than any Big 4 drama premiere last regular season, which is bad enough for a fall drama leading out of House, but consider the comparisons we're making here. It was 0.3 below Miami Medical, a borderline-burnoff on a Friday night late in the season by CBS, and 0.4 before Happy Town, which scored merely a 1.7 in another quasi-burnoff run late in the season on ABC. That is pretty freakin' terrible. Demo retention out of House?  Thirty. Two. Percent. An over-under on number of airings in its future in this hour?  I don't know if it even gets more than one, or even if it gets one more at all. I mean, usually even the bombs get a few weeks, but this is a historic level of ratings ineptitude. They may give it one more week, but I really doubt it gets more than that barring something miraculous happening.

• CBS comedy Mike & Molly kicked off with a 3.9 demo in that always high-pressure post-2.5 Men slot, retaining a little over 80% of the solid Men premiere. This is not a particularly surprising result (I predicted a 4.0 out of Men's 5.0) and I don't think it says much about the long-term prospects. It'll stay here, potentially for multiple years, if it keeps holding 75-80%, but as the percentage drops below that, it becomes a little more dangerous, and below 70% is a real danger zone.

•  NBC's Chase opened to fairly "meh" results with a 2.5 demo out of The Event's 3.7. The start for this more conventional drama out of a genre show reminds me of old Mr. Spotupj favorite Life, which got a 4.0 out of the big-time Bionic Woman start back in 2007. As with Mike & Molly, you can't say a whole lot about Chase from this result alone, and what we'll have to watch going forward is not just how it does but how it does relative to The Event. Life got a second-season renewal because it held up somewhat reasonably in the face of a complete tank-job by The Bionic Woman. Such things may also be ahead for The Event, and if the carnage isn't nearly as bad in Chase's case, it may eke out a "relative to expectations" kind of extension as Life did.