Spotted Ratings, Thursday 9/22/11

WHAT MATTERS:

• For the second straight year, the best ratings news on premiere Thursday was the performance of The Big Bang Theory. The 4.9 rating at 8:00 was even year-to-year with the 8:00 half-hour debut, while the overall average was slightly up. Considering how stellar last year's performance was (and also considering it was easily last season's strongest rating), this is a really good start.

• Winning the night was The X Factor, whose second night ended up only barely down from its Wednesday debut. Fox continues to tout how this program is shoring up these two historically troublesome nights for them (in the fall).

• New show results? I don't think anyone's thrilled. The best showing was probably Whitney, which dropped by only 15% out of The Office, but even it was a slightly weaker showing than the year-ago premiere of Outsourced (3.6 out of a 4.4 Office).

• CBS' Person of Interest joined Tuesday's drama launch Unforgettable in the "OK" pile, dropping big out of Big Bang and, as with Whitney, down a few ticks from the year-ago occupant (CSI's 3.4).

• The two relatively weak launches were ABC's Charlie's Angels, which skewed fairly old (preliminarily only about 31% of its audience was in-demo) and NBC drama Prime Suspect. The only real positive for these two programs was their significant year-to-year timeslot improvement, though that's not that big a deal when the comparisons are to massive flops My Generation (1.6 in the Angels' slot last year) and The Apprentice (1.4 where Suspect aired).

• For the returnees not named Big Bang, it was mostly pretty ugly. The Office probably fared best, down only around 10% from last year, but Grey's Anatomy, The Mentalist, Community and The Vampire Diaries were all in the general vicinity of 20% down. The drop for Parks & Recreation vs. last season's midseason debut was even bigger, though that was largely because of the move to 8:30.

• Finally, week two of The Secret Circle took a surprisingly huge week two drop from its 1.3 premiere. As with Ringer, we'll see if the competish settling down next week will bring a bounce-back. 

FULL TABLE:

	Viewers	A18-49	Share	Skew	Last	Lead	LeLa	Avg	Rank	TRUE
Charlie's Angels	8.74	2.1	6	31%	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	1/1	2.30
Grey's Anatomy	10.38	4.1	10	51%	n/a	+95%	n/a	n/a	1/1	4.08
The Big Bang Theory	14.30	4.9	15	44%	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	1/1	5.84
The Big Bang Theory	14.94	5.1	14	44%	+4%	+4%	n/a	+4%	1/2	5.49
Person of Interest	13.33	3.1	8	30%	n/a	-39%	n/a	n/a	1/1	2.79
The Mentalist	13.56	2.8	7	26%	n/a	-10%	n/a	n/a	1/1	2.43
Community	3.93	1.7	5	55%	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	1/1	1.79
Parks & Recreation	4.11	2.1	6	65%	n/a	+24%	n/a	n/a	1/1	2.33
The Office	7.64	3.9	10	65%	n/a	+86%	n/a	n/a	1/1	4.28
Whitney	6.84	3.3	9	62%	n/a	-15%	n/a	n/a	1/1	3.31
Prime Suspect	6.05	1.8	5	38%	n/a	-45%	n/a	n/a	1/1	1.34
X Factor Thu	12.51	4.3	12	44%	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	1/1	4.80
The Vampire Diaries	2.52	1.2	3	61%	-20%	n/a	n/a	-20%	2/2	1.37
The Secret Circle	2.12	0.9	2	54%	-31%	-25%	-20%	-31%	2/2	0.86

KEY (with much more detail at the New Daily Spotted Ratings page):

Viewers - The total number of viewers (age 2+, in millions) that watched the program.
A18-49 - Adults 18-49 rating. Percentage of US TV-owning adults 18-49 watching the program.
Share - Adults 18-49 share. Percentage of US TV-watching adults 18-49 watching the program.
Skew - Percentage of the total audience that falls in the 18-49 demo.
Last - A18-49 percent difference from previous episode.
Lead - A18-49 percent difference from lead-in program.
LeLa - A18-49 percent difference between the show's lead-in and its lead-in for the previous episode.
Avg - A18-49 percent difference from the show's average demo for previous original episodes this season.
Rank - The A18-49 rating's rank among the show's episodes that have aired so far this season.
TRUE - True Strength, a metric developed last summer that adjusts the A18-49 rating for overall viewing levels, competition and lead-in.

(R) - Repeat.

More Spotted Ratings in the Index.