SpecTrulation, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

I created True Strength this summer because I wanted an effective way to compare different timeslots across the primetime TV landscape. To take advantage of that, I'm going to do one of these posts called "SpecTrulation" each time a show undergoes a move to a drastically different situation. It'll be good for me to highlight these anyway because it's how the ratings responded in these types of drastic moves that formed much of the foundations of True Strength last year. Presumably it'll be that way again in future updates.

The first edition looks at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, an ABC institution on Sundays for almost eight years which makes its debut as a regular Friday program tonight.

TRUE says: The first four weeks of EM:HE this season averaged a very consistent 1.56 TRUE. It'll be moving to Fridays from 8:00 to 10:00, where based on other programs in that slot we estimate it'll have about a -10% Sitch. 1.56 + (-10% * 1.56) = a 1.4 A18-49 rating.

Spot says: A few interesting things here. First, as I noted yesterday, Sunday and to a lesser extent Friday seem like "problem days" for the True Strength metric. Should EM:HE's TRUE be higher if I were "correctly" accounting for sports competition? Also, the -10% Sitch estimate may be a little conservative; if the show maintains its 1.56ish TRUE but the Sitch is more like -15%, that'd be a 1.3 demo.

Not many shows in the last few years have moved to Friday within a season in really "good faith" fashion. Fringe moved at midseason and (at least for a couple weeks) almost fully maintained its Thursday average, but I think that was one of the miracles of the year. Home Edition is going to drop. I'm wary about predicting anything to make a "good" transition to Friday. I think the Sunday TRUE may be undercounted, but I also think the Sitch might be worse, so I'll cancel those out, agree with the objective analysis and say a 1.4 demo.