- Sunday's headliner was easily the season four premiere of The Walking Dead (8.2), which went yet another 28% above its previous high for the season three finale. We can now legitimately entertain the possibility that this series could hang with Sunday Night Football as the #1 series counting sports. (And it should crush it in a popularity measure like Live+7.) In raw numbers, it's the biggest regularly-scheduled drama episode since House on 2/5/08 and the biggest scripted episode since Ashton Kutcher's debut on Two and a Half Men in 2011. If you make any kind of adjustment for the collective decline, it gets even more ridiculous; it's probably only behind Men and the Friends finale in recent memory. Other than that, I got nothing!
- As for the Dead effect on broadcast: It's not good that ABC's Revenge has officially returned to its weak spring 2013 level while Once Upon a Time is almost there, or that Betrayal (0.9) has gone well below last year's low point for 666 Park Ave. But it was even uglier on CBS, where The Amazing Race, The Good Wife and The Mentalist went into lowest-ever territory.
- Sunday Night Football held off the Dead after finals and had its biggest number in a month, while Fox's ALCS rode an NFL lead-in to a significant improvement on Saturday's game 1 number.
FULL TABLE:
| Info | Show | Timeslot | True | |||||||
| A18-49 | Skew | Last | LeLa | Rank | y2y | TLa | Ty2y | |||
| America's Funniest Home Videos | 1.2 | 29% | n/a | n/a | n/a | 1/1 | -20% | +85% | -14% | 1.2 |
| Once Upon a Time | 2.4 | 40% | -8% | -0.2 | +0.5 | 3/3 | -20% | -8% | -21% | 2.4 |
| Revenge | 1.6 | 34% | -16% | -0.3 | -0.2 | 3/3 | -38% | -18% | -40% | 1.5 |
| Betrayal | 0.8 | 35% | -27% | -0.3 | -0.3 | 3/3 | n/a | -30% | -47% | 0.8 |
| ABC: | -6% | -30% | ||||||||
| 60 Minutes | 1.5 | 18% | -61% | -2.3 | n/a | 2/3 | -25% | -87% | -27% | 1.5 |
| The Amazing Race | 1.9 | 30% | -21% | -0.5 | -2.3 | 3/3 | -27% | -42% | -27% | 1.9 |
| The Good Wife | 1.2 | 18% | -25% | -0.4 | -0.5 | 3/3 | -29% | -48% | -27% | 1.3 |
| The Mentalist | 1.3 | 18% | -13% | -0.2 | -0.4 | 3/3 | -38% | -19% | -37% | 1.4 |
| CBS: | -69% | -29% | ||||||||
| Football Night in America p2 | 1.7 | 48% | -19% | -0.4 | n/a | 3/6 | -26% | -19% | -26% | 1.5 |
| Football Night in America p3 | 4.5 | 49% | +10% | +0.4 | -0.4 | 2/6 | +0% | +10% | -2% | 4.1 |
| Sunday Night Football | 8.4 | 48% | +20% | +1.4 | +0.4 | 3/7 | +9% | +19% | +8% | 7.6 |
| NBC: | +16% | +5% | ||||||||
| NFL Overrun | 9.2 | 44% | -7% | -0.7 | n/a | 4/6 | +12% | +667% | +19% | 9.1 |
| The OT | 5.1 | 46% | +9% | +0.4 | -0.1 | 1/2 | +16% | +183% | +16% | 2.5 |
| ALCS | 2.4 | 36% | +26% | +0.5 | n/a | 1/2 | n/a | +1% | +10% | 2.1 |
| Fox: | +91% | +15% | ||||||||
| Big4: | +13% | -3% | ||||||||
KEY (click to expand)
A18-49 - Adults 18-49 rating. Percentage of US TV-owning adults 18-49 watching the program.
Skew - Percentage of adults 18-49 within the show's total viewership.
Last - A18-49 difference (percent and numerical) from the show's previous episode.
LeLa - A18-49 difference between the show's lead-in and its lead-in for the previous episode.
Rank - The A18-49 rating's rank among the show's episodes so far this season.
y2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the show's rating a year ago.
TLa - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one week ago.
Ty2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one year ago.
True - A metric that adjusts the A18-49 rating for overall viewing levels, competition and lead-in. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION. For finals, see SpotVault.
(R) - Repeat.
Much more detail on these numbers at the New Daily Spotted Ratings page.
Skew - Percentage of adults 18-49 within the show's total viewership.
Last - A18-49 difference (percent and numerical) from the show's previous episode.
LeLa - A18-49 difference between the show's lead-in and its lead-in for the previous episode.
Rank - The A18-49 rating's rank among the show's episodes so far this season.
y2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the show's rating a year ago.
TLa - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one week ago.
Ty2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one year ago.
True - A metric that adjusts the A18-49 rating for overall viewing levels, competition and lead-in. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION. For finals, see SpotVault.
(R) - Repeat.
Much more detail on these numbers at the New Daily Spotted Ratings page.
More Spotted Ratings in the Index.
14 comments:
Enough with this madness! Networks need to send reality to sundays and be done with it, it's no place for dramas anymore. DWTS and Survivor should to sundays.
Yep, The Good Wife and The Mentalist are getting axed this year. One of them could survive due to some combination of events (comedy reduction, Intelligence flops, Undercover Boss is held, poor drama development), but at the moment both of them leaving is the way to bet IMO. Every other drama (except Hostages, of course) should be safe.
The Good Wife will be renewed.
I love it, so the bear won't eat this show.
8.2 for The Walking Dead UNBELIEVABLE!
That's beyond belief! There's a good chance it beat Sunday Night Football in its timeslot!
By "regularly scheduled drama episode," do you just mean non-Super Bowl boosted? Or is there another scheduling bonanza I can't think of right now?
Yeah, that's mostly just there to weed out Super Bowl numbers.
More than likely, yes. But even so, the number on any drama ep period (assuming "drama" for scheduling purposes = "one hour timeslot") is Glee's low 11 figure for its post-SB ep in 2011. (Elementary, of course, reset the bar on post-SB flameouts w/ that hideous 7.8 last year)
So, well...I guess Mr. Igwell's number wasn't such folly after all.
Every time you think TWD has stopped rewriting the record books, it starts again.
I guess the networks phoning in Sundays looks a bit more justified now.
An interesting prospect: According to this site, the last show to have a higher index average than last season's Walking Dead was Friends' final season with 300. All Walking Dead has to do to beat that is, what, a 6.0 average, even assuming a smaller league average drop than last year? Craziness.
Unbelievable. I am so happy for the show. It's my favorite show on TV and I am so glad to see it doing well! But damn this is ridiculous, that number makes no sense. Will it never stop growing? It certainly looks like that!
With an 8.2 premiere, we can start talking in those terms now. I'd back it to top the Idol numbers, thus making it the biggest entertainment hit in the relative landscape since *at least* Friends.
Wow. First we talked of it as a broadcast-sized hit. Then as a TBBT-sized hit. Now we're talking (in the relative landscape, at least) peak-Idol-sized hit. If not bigger. This show has rewritten the books of cable ratings, and then rewritten the new ones as well.
At this point, CBS is right in just letting TGW and TM die on the vine there. What's the point now? If ABC sees a future for Once or Revenge, they should switch them with Dancing.
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