I initially was gonna make this largely about the new broadcast shows, but I realized much or most of that would end up being redundant with all the upcoming "First Two Weeks" posts, so I decided to look through some cable highlights of the last week and a half or so. The "week ending" guideline is even less accurate than usual, as three of these five actually happened on January 17. But anyway, here's your Ratings Five-Spot for the "week" "ending" January 16, 2011:
The Game - I wrote much more about the almost unthinkably huge return of
The Game in a
previous post than I could in these six lines. If that's tl;dr, the jist is that this fairly unassuming CW sitcom that got shoved out the door after three seasons because it didn't fit the network's vision suddenly quadrupled its audience in the transition to cable despite not airing an original in almost two calendar years. In a matter of hours we'll see just how big of a one-week fluke last Tuesday's result was.
Tosh.0 - Also plowing through its previous ratings ceiling, though to a smaller extent, was Comedy Central's
Tosh.0. It quietly premiered in late 2009 to just 1.3 million viewers and a 0.5 demo and had impressively climbed as high as 2.65m/1.4 in its summer 2010 run. But its return last Tuesday (interestingly in the same half-hour as
The Game) shot up to 3.57 million viewers and a 2.1 in A18-49. Lead-out
Onion Sportsdome followed with 1.52 million viewers and a 0.9 A18-49 in its series premiere at 10:30.
Being Human - It was a very British Monday on cable TV, and that began at 9:00 on Syfy with the premiere of
Being Human, a remake of the British show with the same name. It kicked off with 1.96 million viewers and a 0.8 demo. Could be better, could be worse, as this was a couple ticks below both the series and season 2 premieres of
Warehouse 13 and would basically be about an average episode of that show, but it still had a stronger demo than other recent Syfy premieres like
Caprica (0.4) and
Haven (0.7).
Piers Morgan Tonight - When you air five times a week, it's obviously much more about where you settle than where you start. But Piers Morgan got off to a nice start on Monday with 2.1 million viewers, which is about what Larry King got for his finale (and was a huge spike from typical
Larry King Live ratings). As I was writing about that, the news came in that he dropped to 1.3 million on night 2, but that number would also be a win for CNN. Thing is, it probably hasn't settled down just yet.
Skins - The other remake of a British show on Monday night was MTV's
Skins, which premiered to 3.26 million viewers and set some MTV series premiere records. What they didn't mention in the press release was the 7.7 million viewers pulled by its lead-in, a special Monday edition of
Jersey Shore. So it's a fine raw number but pretty bad retention, and we really aren't going to have much of a sense of where this show is at till we see how it does as a self-starter.
More Five-Spots in the Index.
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