First Two Weeks, Once Upon a Time

ONCE UPON A TIME (ABC)

WEEK ONE
In what had been a fairly soft fall to date for drama premieres, Once Upon a Time was the first to really buck the trend. It scored a 4.0 demo with 12.93 million total viewers. That's 0.7 points ahead of the previous drama high (Revenge's 3.3), and it came in the Sunday 8/7c timeslot against the World Series and Sunday Night Football and with no real lead-in (America's Funniest Home Videos got a 1.5). Great start.

WEEK TWO
Week two saw Once Upon a Time lose a pretty decent chunk of its overall viewership (down to 11.74 million) but the 18-49 demo held up really well. It dropped 3% to a 3.9. That was even more impressive considering the show had to face the start of a much larger football game, the tail end of a football- and Madoff-family-fueled 60 Minutes and the big Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons. The week two rating was actually Truly up by 4% from week one due to those factors.

PROGNOSIS
Damn youuuu, ABC! They've put together yet another show with a great first two weeks, but yet another show that could be susceptible to big drops beyond that (serialized drama). I'm already most likely wrong on one (Pan Am) but, yet again, I have no real choice but to predict this show gets a second season. This show's first two weeks are considerably more impressive than any other drama's this season on any network. If this one falls apart, I may just have to stop doing these posts for non-procedural dramas going forward, because clearly the early ratings have no real bearing.

"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."