The War of 18-49, Leverage

LEVERAGE (TNT)

Scheduling history: Leverage premiered with a special Sunday airing and aired the rest of season one on Tuesday. It moved to Wednesday in season two, then to Sunday in season three. It began season five back on Sunday, but the series' final run returned to where it all began: Tuesday at 10:00.

See (who saw) how it all began: That special Sunday airing on December 7, 2008 came after TNT premiered the third installment in its The Librarian franchise of TV movies. The Librarian movie was seen by 5.44 million viewers, then Leverage followed with 4.99 million viewers and a 1.6 A18-49 rating. I don't have a bunch of the season one demo ratings, but the viewership (typically around three million) combined with the skew for the episodes I do have suggests the show ended up in the 0.9 to 1.0 range for most of the rest of season one.

The best of times: That post-Librarian premiere remains easily Leverage's series high. Aside from that, though, it's tough to come up with a clear highest sustained level. For a really large chunk of Leverage's run, especially in the summer, Leverage has scored right in that exact same 0.9 to 1.0 range, including last summer. The second highest rating for Leverage remains the 1.3 demo it pulled for the premiere of the second half of season two on 1/13/10.

The worst of times: In the last few years, Leverage has become yet another of those standalone cable dramas that doesn't hold up all that well in the regular season. The season three regular season run was kind of an anomaly because it aired just three episodes, but the first of those episodes on 12/12/10 managed just a 0.5 demo rating, which remained the series low until the last few episodes at the end of 2012, when it hit a 0.5 demo for each of the first three episodes of that final run. It perked back up as high as a 0.7 for the Christmas Night series finale.

Then vs. now: For several years, Leverage was quietly one of the steadiest-rated shows around, even if its ratings were never anything all that special. It managed to survive long enough to get renewed four times even though it was always one big downturn away from falling into real hot water. That big downturn finally came in 2012, perhaps thanks in part to getting shoved down to the 8:00 hour in the summer. Cable originals do not exactly have an incredibly rich history, but it still may come as a bit of a surprise that Leverage has the second-longest run of any TNT drama as of its ending. It is a pretty admirable feat for a show that never had that much buzz.

Adults 18-49 info by season:

Seas	Year	Timeslot	Avg	y2y	Lo	Hi	Results	Grade
1	Fall 2008	Sunday 10:00	1.0		0.0	1.6	7/13
2A	Summer 2009	Wednesday 9:00	0.95		0.8	1.1
2B	Winter 2010	Wednesday 10:00	0.95	-8%	0.8	1.3
3A	Summer 2010	Sunday 9:00	0.95	+0%	0.8	1.1
3B	Fall 2010		0.63	-33%	0.5	0.7
4A	Summer 2011		0.91	-5%	0.7	1.1
4B	Fall 2011		0.68	+7%	0.6	0.8
5A	Summer 2012	Sunday 8:00	0.71	-22%	0.6	0.8		C-
5B	Fall 2012	Tuesday 10:00	0.56	-17%	0.5	0.7

Historical-adjusted ratings by season:

Seas	Year	A18-49+	Label	Now15	y2y	Lo	Hi	Premiere	Finale
1	Fall 2008	34				30	53	53	33
2A	Summer 2009	32				27	37	33	33
2B	Winter 2010	34				28	46	46	32
3A	Summer 2010	34				28	39	36	36
3B	Fall 2010	25				20	28	20	28
4A	Summer 2011	36				27	43	39	35
4B	Fall 2011	29				25	34	30	34
5A	Summer 2012	30				25	35	35	28
5B	Fall 2012	27				24	33	24	33

For more on The War of 18-49, my look at the history of primetime TV's veteran shows, see the Index.