Could Heather Locklear’s return coupled with Ashlee Simpson’s departure be enough to lure in some new viewers?

For example, 90210 has a lot of teenage viewers, under the age of 18, which would appeal to the same advertisers that buy slots on Nick or ABC Family, but this rating is almost never published on this site.

In the case of Smallville, it has a high number of male adults, majority in their late 30s/early 40s, which the CW can use to lure in big-bucks advertisers who want to advertise mature male-intended products.

Although I’m from the UK, I watch Smallville via streaming, and the type of adverts played during the East Coast feed are quite different to say what’s played during The Vampire Diaries. I notice more Ford/GM car ads, more restaurants ads for something called Red Lobster, more financial planning ads, etc.

I highly doubt the likes of Morgan Stanley of WaMu advertise during Gossip Girl – but if they do, feel free to correct me…

GG 2.78, Vampire 2.72, Model 2.48, 90210 2.35, Hill 2.22, Place 1.73, Super 1.53

Vampire Diaries just might save the CW, if it goes above a 2 they might be almost mildly respected again.

Add to that the increasing autocorrelation, though… and I have to start wondering.

Consider “Leno”: It contributes around 5/22nds (23%) of NBC’s overall rating – which is what you are comparing it to in the Index. So “Leno” is a lot more likely to be close to 1.00 than, say, “30 Rock”, which contributes less than 1/44th (2%) of NBC’s overall. For the CW, each show has a relatively high contribution of 1/10th to the network overall – less than “Leno”, but much more than “30 Rock”.

And now I think I’ve overstayed my statistical welcome. Good night.

Re: MP, I never liked the original. And I don’t know why CW would think Locklear would be a ratings draw for their target audience? She is three years older than me. She (and I) could easily be mothers to the lower end of the CW young woman demo.

I can see people my age, who would’ve fallen in the young woman demo category for the original, tuning in for curiosity (Not me!!), but why would people who were young children back in the day care?

The lesser the numbers of primetime, the more autocorrelation between one show’s rating and the overall primetime rating. And the smaller the network ratings overall, the less variance between shows. So for the CW, you are bound to end up with values that much more similar to each other.

Of course, I can’t quite refute your argument of empirical evidence in the past – even though the contribution of each hour on the CW’s overall average has, of course, increased by 17% since last season.

(It’ll be worse for NBC and “Leno”, of course, with “Leno” contributing around 23% to NBC’s overall, whereas each CW show only contributes around 10%.)

actually target demos is lower than a melrose place repeat and it w18-34 rating tied with antm encore on fridays!!!

- It’s their third highest rated series in total viewers
- Target demos aren’t THAT bad
- CW don’t pay full whack for the series, the studio (who co-owns the CW anyway) put up half the budget
- High DVD/BR and international sales (massive re-launch imminent in the UK and Ireland), where the CW have gross points
- There is nothing else for them to put on the Friday schedule guaranteed to bring in the same figures as the rest of the week

I suggest you re-think how your Index functions to include things like the above.

On a network by network basis, relative performance is all that matters. The fact that the best CW show doesn’t do as well as the worst ABC show is meaningless for the decision process within the CW. They’ll get rid of their worst shows and try again next season.

That is to say, if the ratings for a lot of your shows are equally disappointing, aren’t you still likely to toss some out at the end of the season in the hopes that new ones will do better?