The Question, Tuesday 12/18/12: Will The Voice Sing One Last Crescendo?

Tonight, for the last time for three months, NBC will air a piece of entertainment programming that gets good ratings. It's been real, NBC. Anyway, the second half of the Voice season has nonethless been a great success story for the peacock. The battle rounds held up incredibly well, and there wasn't all that much of a decline during the live show portion. In the last few weeks, it's been pretty consistently up vs. the spring season, but maintaining that pace against the big May finale is a lot to ask. Will The Voice sing one last crescendo? That's The Question for Tuesday, December 18, 2012.

The Voice In Recent Weeks	The Voice Finale Last Season
3.9 (Monday 12/3/12, +3% year-to-year) 3.5 (Tuesday 12/4/12, +3%) 3.8 (Monday 12/10/12, +9%) 3.6 (Tuesday 12/11/12, +16%) 4.1 (prelim Mon 12/17/12, +8%)	4.4 (Tuesday 5/8/12) +42% vs. penultimate Tuesday airing (3.1) +16% vs. final Monday airing (3.8)

Maybe I should just follow the last few year-to-year trends and assume it'll be up 10% year-to-year or something and hit a 4.8 or 4.9. For some reason, getting that high just feels a little extreme. Perhaps it's because this season was never massive-rated at the beginning, so there's not some huge bloc of fans that could potentially come back. To take the same kind of jump, it'd have to be at pretty much season high ratings. It'll certainly be up from the recent upper-3's level, but I'm saying it's up just around 5% vs. last year's 4.4 finale.

Over/Under (from 9:00 to 11:00): 4.65.

Side bet (though it won't count in any official capacity): how many times between now and the next Voice premiere will an NBC entertainment series get even half of tonight's Voice rating...?


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