Crank up the TiVo, get a pencil and paper and track it yourself. You just have to know the difference between a national ads and local time, and astute guys like you can probably tell.

Try it. It’s fun for the whole family!

Is that something you know or something you guess? I’m rather curious about the breakdown, but not all that willing to trust random internet comments (nothing personal ).

A one hour primetime network program typically contains 10-11 minutes of national advertising time (20-22 :30s). The rest is network promo/ID time –about 4 minutes and local time –about 3 minutes (billboards and PSAs make up less than a half minute of the average hour). Not counted here are in-program ad and promo placements.

Fox traditionally had been giving a little more time than the other nets to their local stations and the expense of their national ad time, but that differential has been shrinking over the years.

Hard to tell whether SGU would fare any better on broadcast, especially on Friday. It might even do worse since fans would be expecting Syfy (aka SighFigh, still making fun of the spelling, sorry) to carry Stargate shows. We’ll never know for sure how it might perform. I do believe House and Bones are rerunning at least once during sweeps, can’t remember if it’s the whole time though, sorry. I know there’s a post with FOX’s schedule update on-site, but I’m too lazy too scroll up right now.

Dollhouse might be viable on cable if the extremely low costs (for FOX) are actually in that $1M area. Put it on Syfy, even on another night after doing a bunch of marathons/reruns, and it might actually do decently enough to stick around. But for a Friday night on broadcast, it’s horrendous. For better or worse, the otherwise old-skewing CBS has Fridays locked up with the 1-2-3 punch of GW, Medium, and Numb3rs. Maybe that’s the saddest reality of all?

But truly, the reality is, we’re closing in on the point where the difference between “broadcast” and “cable” is increasingly minimal, outside of subscription-only fare like “Dexter” and “True Blood”. “Cable” has held much of the so-called “quality” in this last decade. Obviously this is open to opinion, but I can think of many more high-end quality shows on cable than broadcast: The Wire, The Sopranos, True Blood, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, Californication, Damages, The Shield, Nip/Tuck, Burn Notice, Monk, etc. compared to, if anything, Lost, The Unit, The Office and (maybe) the first season of Heroes as core examples lately.

Where’s the innovation? Where’s the true groundbreaking quality? Fact is, it’s (mostly) on cable. And while it mainly ruled solely on quality for many years, ratings are starting to step up to that quality. Burn Notice was among the highest-rated non-sports broadcasts on any NBC-owned network this year (in the demo). The Sopranos was highly competitive on Sundays, even half a decade ago. Dexter has grown solidly each year (if memory serves). Just to provide some examples.

Cable is growing, and broadcast is shrinking. Eventually, it’ll all be just Television to us. That is, if it isn’t already!

On a side note, sadly, I’m guessing The Wire is about a decade away from any possible mainstream acceptance, only cause it’ll take that long for cultural trends to move towards even a basic discovery of that show, let alone any true understanding or appreciation of its value…

Sorry to go off on that rant/tangent, hopefully it provides some amalgamation of what’s going on with television quality and consumption these days. Cheers!

it would probably get a 3.0 or higher in 18-49…with 4-7 million viewers.

Or if it want’s to go real cheap….just rerun House and Hells Kitchen.

Dollhouse is a joke.

How is it on Broadcast while Stargate is on SyFy?

wouldn’t stargate get much higher ratings on broadcast?

I don’t have any “posting privileges on Whedonesque.com” either and I’m obviously a big fan of many things Joss. So you’re in good company (at least imo).

But if those numbers are right I’ve low-balled “local” in my estimates. Either way, the gap between scripted and unscripted was interesting. I think I will do my own monitoring scorecard (not including product placement) on tomorrow’s NCIS and see how closely that matches TNS’ averages.

The report is here http://www.tns-mi.com/news/09162009.htm

Edit: my understanding is that pricing at the upfronts is usually based on the averages of the most recent season.

Apparenly TIL DEATH will have a four episode marathon on Christmas Eve! Brothers will finish all its episodes by the end of the year. And Dollhouse will return on January on its regular timeslot with a show yet to be determined

Make-goods is my new vocabulary word for the day, and it definitely, uh, destroys my entire line of thinking. There’s so much more I want to know but I don’t expect you to go over it all.

It seems like once a show is renewed, it’s goal is to repeat what it’s done before. So what gets a first year show going is how it fits in the networks overall package it plans to deliver at next years upfronts, right?

Anyhow, I’m not a whedonite protecting my show, and I’m obviously not a number cruncher by trade, just trying to learn.