Premiere Ratings: Raising Hope, Running Wilde, Detroit 1-8-7

As I did yesterday, I'll quickly run through how I see the ratings performances for the series premieres on Tuesday, and check back this evening for another year-to-year table. Today, we look at Fox comedies Raising Hope and Running Wilde along with ABC's Detroit 1-8-7.

• Fox's Raising Hope kicked off with a 3.1 prelim, which is undoubtedly one of the better series premiere ratings for a live-action comedy on Fox in recent years. (Other recent examples: 'Til Death's 3.1 on 9/7/06, Happy Hour's 2.4 on 9/7/06, The Winner's 3.5 on 3/4/07, Back to You's 3.1 on 9/17/07, Unhitched's 2.6 on 3/2/08, Do Not Disturb's 1.9 on 9/10/08, and Sons of Tucson's 2.1 on 3/14/10). But it had a much larger lead-in than any of those above shows; considering Glee's monstrous 5.5 rating has a shot at being the highest-rated scripted episode of the entire season (aside from Glee post-Super Bowl), it's a pretty modest start. I predicted a 3.0, so I was close, but I had Glee lower (4.8). That said, you have to look at the utterly atrocious start of Lone Star, which is going to be out of the picture in a couple weeks, and say that Fox is pretty likely to keep this and the below show on the air for at least awhile.

• And Running Wilde posted a 2.5 prelim, dropping almost 20% of the Raising Hope start. That isn't really that surprising (again, I was close, predicting a 2.4!) just because the Glee lead-in to Raising Hope was so substantial that people were likely to be tuning out. It's once again a pretty inconclusive start, and not really any different from Raising Hope's performance considering the lead-ins. If they were flipped timeslot-wise, I think their ratings would just about flip.

• The weakest premiere of the night raw numbers-wise was the 2.4 demo for ABC's Detroit 1-8-7 (accompanied by a lot of P2+ that will make some people happier than they should be). As with Raising Hope, it was a substantial drop from a large lead-in. I was close-ish yet again (I said a 2.5) but that doesn't mean much because I didn't predict good things for the show. It trailed The Forgotten's 2.6 of last year in the same hour, and that was with the Dancing results show lead-in way up on a year-to-year basis, from 3.5 to a prelim 4.3. Detroit also dropped big at the half, from a 2.7 to a 2.2. I liked the pilot a lot better than what little I saw of The Forgotten, but it's hard to spin this as a good start.

EDIT: The Detroit and Forgotten lead-ins were actually closer, as Dancing was treated differently the last two years. Last year it was one two-hour episode that averaged a 3.5, this year two separate episodes (one of them a recap) which, averaged together, were about the same.