First Two Weeks, A Gifted Man

A GIFTED MAN (CBS)

WEEK ONE
CBS premiered its new drama A Gifted Man in one of TV's most brutal timeslots, Friday 8/7c, to a mere 1.4 demo. That's not an impressive number even in that timeslot, though it tied the year-ago performance from the final season of Medium and was only a couple tenths behind Kitchen Nightmares for the timeslot lead. Still, it was easily the weakest of the three CBS Friday dramas and (with 9.45 million viewers) one of the oldest skewing programs of premiere week. Because of the timeslot, the number was Truly much higher (1.77) but still behind pretty much everything else original on CBS.

WEEK TWO
Week two saw a typical 14% drop to a 1.2 demo, still even with the year-ago Medium but still rather unimpressive and still a far cry from the other CBS Friday dramas.

PROGNOSIS
It doesn't get much worse for a new show than getting slotted on Friday at 8/7c, and you can pretty easily prognosticate the fate of most of these shows before they even premiere. It doesn't seem like A Gifted Man is the show that will return CBS to its Ghost Whisperer glory days. Being even with Medium is not exactly a monumental achievement considering those early results caused CBS to shorten Medium's order. Still, unless it drops another big chunk, I think it'll at least get to play out most to all of its initial order as CBS prepares to bring some other marginal show over at midseason (Unforgettable?). But it doesn't look good for a season two.

"First Two Weeks" is my look at... the first two weeks of a new scripted broadcast show's ratings. I also line all of these numbers up to do an objective analysis in what I call "the system."