Law and Order was at 14 million and people were talking about it like it was fading away. Bones had 12 million viewers and was on shaky ground with a number that would be considered fine and dandy today. And then you look at Invasion’s 9 million and realize that ABC would love the have it back and doing those numbers right now.

Well, NBC would love to have it now anyway.

The drop in viewership for the broadcast nets has been staggering in just the past three years. Or at least the drop in viewership for scripted shows on broadcast nets has been staggering.

We are living through a tipping point, I think. Be interesting to see where it stabalizes. Or if it stabalizes. I still think we lose one of the big broadcast nets in the next ten years. Maybe two.

http://www.tvguide.com

Ratings: Life Makes a Lively Comeback

“9 pm
Fox’s Lie to Me stayed on top with 13 million viewers, up 900K from last week. Lost tied the Fox newbie in the demos while holding steady at 11 million viewers. NBC’s Life returned to an audience of 6.76 mil, surging 30 percent from its last fresh outing. Katie Couric’s Grammy special cued up 6.8 mil, but was bested by Life in its back half-hour.”

Too bad next fall Leno is gonna be hogging so many hours in primetime really killing any chance shows like Life have for getting another season.

I didn’t watch anything else last night but I have to agree with JT on the commercials for many of the spring shows that I have seen this week. The new promos are much more appealing. Already, we are pumped to see which stars will take the ballroom dancing plunge this Sunday night. The new Dollhouse trailer is ten times better than the first combo trailer that was created with TSCC. I was really impressed as well with crime dramas, The Unusuals and Castle. I hope they don’t have one good episode and then fall to pieces like LOM. I even liked all the new promos for sitcoms; In the Motherhood, Rules of Engagement and Parks & Recreation. I think all the major networks will see some improvement by the time they have their new schedules rolling along in March.

Lost is amazing! season5 is oh so great!!! I hope it gets more viewers! I don’t get why Fox’s new shows Fringe and Lie to Me are doing so well! Gahhh!.

I think there’s still hope for Life on Mars! the show is amazing I love it. Plus it won the 18-34 share at 10pm.

I just hope all the sitcoms in ABC suck (Better Off ted, Surviving Suburbia, Samantha Who and Scrubs) and all will be cancelled! ABC is better with 1hour scripted shows and they could keep those shows.

Count me among the type of Bones fan that doesn’t care how the show I love gets it’s ratings, I just care that it’s nice and safe, which it is. If I could stick Chuck on after Idol just for the ratings, I would.

Now then, I figure I should say something pertinent to Wednesdays’ ratings so… Am I allowed to call Lie to Me a bonafide hit now? People just can’t seem to get enough of their crime procedurals. Unless that procedural is Life, which, ironically seems like it’d be one of the better ones (never watched).

I have a good feeling about Lie To Me! 18-49 looks pretty respectable…

That being said, I don’t quite see why ABC has been airing repeats of Lost in the 8 PM time slot. I mean, they could’ve taken the last 3 weeks to air the remaining episodes of Pushing Daisies which would have had similar ratings. Oh well, there’ll be a DVD. Also, things aren’t looking too good for Life on Mars. I’ll cherish what little episodes we’ll probably have left.

Interesting that Lie to Me didn’t fall in the finals this week. Could it actually be developing a real audience rather than just Idol’s leftovers?

I forgot that LOST was so big, if you look at the fall 2005 numbers it’s even bigger. That season LOST started a decline which continues to this day. The combination of 3 bad episodes in a row, tons of repeats betwine new episodes, and the highest rated AI (with the lamest winner) killed LOST as a broad appeal show.

In 3 years LOST lost over 7 million viewers, L&O lost 6, and BIGGEST LOSER dubled it’s viewership.

I agree with a lot of the other commentators here: NBC is basically ignoring Life. BTW, I always hated that title; it doesn’t sound like a cop show, it sounds like a hour dramedy ala Providence.

Ben Silverman 0 Fred Silverman 1

Hyperbole and I know it, but pretty realistic hyperbole nonetheless when you consider how far that show has fallen.

We can all talk about the reasons for the The Office airing after the SB until we are green in the face and blue in the gills, but it will never change the fact of what a massive screw up it was. That NBC didn’t have a show waiting to go since before the season even began is just total mismanagment. They have only known this day was coming for the past two years. To end up totally wasting the slot to no purpose should get Silverman not only fired but also locked up in Gitmo (once they let all the detainees go, that is).

Hey, an idea for a new reality show: Bennie Goes to Gitmo! Talk about a potential ratings bonanza. Imagine the spike in viewers in Week 6 when Dick Ebersol hooks the car battery up to Bennie’s gonads.

Anyway, I highly doubt people paid prime $$$ to air ads during The Office, as opposed to airing adds during whatever else might air in the spot. You could have run old Green Acres reruns and people were going to pay pretty much the same amount, because the ads were probably sold based on a projected number, and not based on whatever actual show was airing. So they guarenteed a number and then would have to offer make-good free ads if they do not meet that number. What they aired in the slot likely had zero impact on how much money they made from that hour.

But even if you go with Robert’s figure (5-10 million), that’s, sad to say, a drop in the bucket. Five million bucks buys you production costs for one hour of Heroes. Maybe one and a half. Five million dollars in ad buys, or even ten, will again have zero impact on NBC viability in even the shortest of short terms. No one is going to save their job based on that amount of money. NBC will not be helped in the least by that amount of money. And, as I said, NBC likely would have made the same amount of money if they had aired Ben Silverman’s colonoscopy, so long as 20 million people watched.

Quick aside: if they would have offered to let the winner of a reality show GIVE Ben Silverman a colonoscopy, likely they would have gotten 20 million applications just to be on that show, let alone watch it.

No one will ever convince me that wasting that time slot was anything other than gross negligence. I guess that doesn’t leave much room for discussion, but there you go. NBC is in the dumper because they are inept network. It ain’t bad luck, and it ain’t because Tim Kring is a bonehead (which he is).

It is because from Ben Silverman to Jack Donaghy, and all the way up to Don Geiss, you have a bunch of guys who do not know what in the hell they are doing.

Which is pretty annoying when you consider how much richer than us they all are.

I don’t want to say here, just in case it’s true; I don’t want to spoil anything. But go to here Lostpedia article and look in the theory section.

What is the deal with Wednesdays? The 18-34 ratings, Lie to me has a 4.0 and the next lowest goes all the way to a 2.1 for Cuidado con el Angel. I know there were repeats, but still it seems like a major gap. I’ve notice this about Wednesday all year and I just find it odd.

As for the characters, there are a lot of characters on the show and different people are going to like and dislike different characters. Personally, I’m not all that into the O6 story so far; I prefer the island stories, including all the new characters. But Charlotte REALLY needs to start doing something, especially if she is who people are predicting she is.

As for the actualy ratings of LtM this week, it’s much the same as Fringe, both shows did not get an initial boost from their first post Idol airing as huge as I’d have expected, but both seem to hang on to the numbers extremely well. Good job!

I am sad for Life, but yeah, the best I could do is spin it enough to make it look better than Life on Mars and that’s just pathetic all on its own.

You’ve mentioned you enjoy Life before. Me too! I have a question for you. Followed by a rant. Then a return to the question. (!)

Does NBC *want* Life to be canceled? Ricardo mentioned that they never gave the show’s return any promotion during the Super Bowl. (I didn’t see EVERY commercial during the Super Bowl, but I saw almost all of them and I sure didn’t see anything about Life’s return.) It was off the air for 6 or 7 weeks, I think. And there was even a mid-season cliffhanger to resolve but no ads hyping this. How were fans going to know the show was coming back?

And howzabout promoting the show with ads trumpeting it as one of AFI’s 10 Best TV Programs of the Year? As an aside, only three of this top ten are network shows: Life, Lost, and The Office. How sad it is that two of these three shows AIR AT THE SAME TIME, UP AGAINST ONE ANOTHER! When is the last time a show as good as Life received so little promotion from its own network? (Even ABC was behind Pushing Daisies during the abbreviated first season with a lot of on-air promos for that program.)

NBC has never promoted this show. In 2007, NBC was all about promoting Bionic Woman, with Chuck getting modest attention and the other newcomers, Journeyman and Life, getting almost no notice. In 2008, NBC seemingly put all of its promotion behind Knight Rider and My Own Worst Enemy. Honestly, I find it remarkable that 6.76 million viewers stumbled across Life last night at all, given how NBC spent $0.00 promoting the show between mid-December and yesterday.

So back to my question. Does NBC *want* Life off the air? Why bother to put it on at all then? It just bugs me A LOT when a show is good, then gets moved around the schedule with little or no promotion—Life has air new episodes on three different nights so far this season—then gets canceled with the network claiming “well, the ratings weren’t good enough”.

Sorry for the rant. (Oh, and I WATCH Life and RECORD Lost! Enjoy them both!)

People will find a show if it interests them. CSI started on Fridays and became the biggest scripted shoe in the past 7 years. NCIS started as a spin-off of a medium size show and look at it now, if it keeps up next year it will be the #1 scripted show.

My problem at the end was not the fact that it wasn’t a major twist, but more so that the writers acted like nobody could’ve figured that out beforehand.

They have 6 hours worth of scripted “Fall” shows that look good to come back, plus 2 for Biggest Loser. That only leaves 2 hours to fill among either new spring shows this season or new adds for next season.”

Robert: NBC won’t cancel everything, but with Leno at 10pm it will be cancelling several shows. Barring a miraculous boost into the mid 2.0’s (heck, getting a 2.0 would be good news) for 18-49s, Life and Knight Rider will certainly be among the cancelled.

Oh, well. At least it lasted two seasons.

NBC was shortsighted, when the Amy Poehler show wasn’t available(which they should have figured out sooner than they did), they should have tried to have one of their other midseason shows ready to give it the biggest sampling possible and try to get them a big hit.

Given the event, they could’ve aired an hour of Jeff Zucker and Ben Silverman talking about how much TVbytheNumbers sucks and it still probably would’ve averaged 15 million. But they’d have made $0.00 ad revenue on that.

I think airing Chuck or Life would’ve made some differences for those shows numbers, but how much a week or two from now? Hard to say. If Nick is right and The Office could outperform by $5M-$10M worth, it could take a long time for the benefits to make that difference.

My guess is that NBC probably pretty much already figures it is renewing Chuck and didn’t want to give the post Super Bowl slot to a show produced by Warner Bros and that it already figures it is cancelling Life so it didn’t want to waste the slot on a show it knew it was going to cancel.

Life only has crappy ratings because NBC doesn’t promote it. They were on Fridays for God sakes! Then, they put it on Wednesdays against Criminal Minds with a lead-in like Knight Rider. What were they expecting? When Life had a better lead-in, the episode boost to 8 million. Bang! It’s obvious that the show has potential.

Life is a procedural. People love procedurals. And this is actually a good one. I am pretty sure that if NBC had air Life after the Super Bowl, they would have saved the series. And it would have much better ratings than The Office.

BTW, Alias was on ABC.

And let’s face it, you can get 20 million viewers for a test pattern after the Super Bowl (like Fox did with Alias), so the difference between what the Office got and what any other show with that type of lead in would have garnered would likely not be that large. Certainly not large enough to offset all the money you lose by not trying to launch (or at least relaunch) a show in the only time slot NBC has all year that will guarentee a gigantic sampling.

Yeah, they may be be losing some money over at NBC, but they don’t actually NEED the money. They are not in any danger of folding. And they just cut tens of millions of dollars out of next season budget with their Leno deal. What they actually NEED is a hit. One hit can make a giaganctic difference to a networks fortunes. The Office is never going to be that hit.

NBC should have had either a mid season replacement ready to launch after the game, or they should have slotted Chuck in there and counted on the 3D curiousity to help them grab them a giant number, which it would have. Instead they wasted the slot completely on The Office for some short term dollars that will have zero impact on NBC’s ability to come back from the hole they have dug for themselves. There is just no way that makes any sort of sense.