Soon (9/28) Dexter and Californication will square off head-to-head with True Blood and Entourage on Sunday nights. I'm not sure the folks at Time Warner will be able to handle being beat by Showtime in a head-to-head competition. But it actually could happen.
HBO's new series True Blood premiered to a less than stellar 1.4 million viewers. USA Today described the numbers as modest. "Modest" must be the new "that sucks". The numbers for the Alan Ball (and I loved American Beauty) vampire drama stunk. I'm not saying the show stunk, only the numbers.
I know what you're thinking: but Mad Men gets numbers like that and you love it! Mad Men is on modest AMC and its season premiere at least did over two million viewers. HBO has a history of success, unfortunately, it's just history and all in the past. Even once the heyday of The Sopranos was over, it still routinely pulled more than six times as many viewers as True Blood. I predicted the numbers for True Blood would not be Sopranos or Sex and the City like, but I didn't think they would be so...modest.
When there was no press release from HBO, I definitely figured under 3 million viewers, but under two million surprises me. I have to imagine it surprises (and disappoints) HBO even more. Though HBO is quick to point out when the 10:30p rebroadcast is factored in, the total viewer number bounces to 2.1 million. But even with that lumped in, the numbers must still be tremendously disappointing. Last summer John in Cincinnati premiered to 3.4 million viewers according to Variety, though admittedly "John" didn't have to compete with Sunday Night Football. HBO is already anticipating DVR viewing numbers, which seems pretty desperate for a show that just premiered.
Meanwhile, Entourage fades, drawing 1.6 million in its season five premiere following True Blood on Sunday, down from 2.2 million for the season four premiere.
don’t overreact… (i agree it’s weak) but it’s just one show, it’s a vampire show (not mainstream), it was up against mtv awards and football, you can’t compare first season of this to established seasons of classic hbo shows like sex and soprano’s that took years to establish and used as lead ins to other minimal hits at the time like six feet, plus hbo has been in such a rut people are out of the habit of watching no matter how much promotion and while true blood was ok promotion it wasn’t like in the past and i also think people are gun shy of watching hbo shows after they killed rome, carnival, deadwood etc… they probably pissed off 3-5 million fans overall of those shows… and hbo has always relied on rebroadcast numbers and multi channel numbers for their shows…. showtime does the same thing… they claim 20 million viewers for weeds but it’s after 200 repeats including some alien planets. these numbers make total sense. i for one don’t care if it does well or doesn’t… didn’t see it… and probably won’t… but if hbo is going to come back to what they were (and i do miss the glory days) it’s baby steps and this is the first step. need to build good will and habit and stick with shows, small shows with niche audiences and eventually they’ll hit a big one but if they keep axing shows after 2 seasons continuing to hope for the homerun they are going to fail over and over again.
So it looks like Mad Men actually beat Entourage’s season premiere and also seems to be building week to week. True?
Tom, HBO promoted the heck out of the show. There’s no doubt those numbers are very disappointing regardless of the competition. It seems more of a failure to me than anything remotely resembling a baby step.
Monique, I didnt’ see how Mad Men did last Sunday. It’s not growing week-to-week based on the data we have seen, it pulled back from its premiere significantly and then rebounded a bit but not back to the premiere level. But its season two premiere did outperform Entourage’s season five premiere.
They should’ve kept the Wire. If you can’t get Ratings, you can at least brag about the high quality of your programming. Mad Men would’ve worked well on HBO.
Thanks for the update. Vampire shows just arn’t mainstream. Those of us who love paranormal romance/horror definately arn’t going to produce the sort of numbers most big networks want.
I keep hoping someone will realise what a small but fiercely loyal minority we are and put it on a network that would appreciate numbers in the law millions. Moonlight if it went to CW would have brought in better numbers even without promotion than True Blood did. Im not sure I have a point but I guess Im hoping networks don’t give up on paranormal but adjust their expectations.
Mean’t to say “low” millions
VvvV
I think too that they have to take into account how many people watch the show on demand instead of the actual premiere, like me. Especially that night, it was going up against things like football and the VMA’s, so a lot of people probably watched it at a different time.
Jen, true, though it’s highly unlikely that boosted total viewing by more than 50%. Even if it doubled viewing (not only highly unlikely, based on all data we’ve ever seen, simply not possible!)the numbers would still have been less than John from Cincinnati — though in fairness that did follow the series finale of The Sopranos…
BTW, Bill just posted some really interesting data on DVR and VOD usage.
Just like to add that the promos for true blood stunk like hell. Did not attract me to the series at all, only watched it cause was looking for a Moonlight replacement. And loved it. So HBO know this, advertising for TRUE BLOOD sucked big time. But enjoy true blood now.