American Idol returned to the air last night, winning the night handily but continuing the show’s long slide from phenomenon to mere mortal status.  The two-hour premiere last night averaged a 6.0 adult 18-49 rating from 8-10 pm, down 19% from last year’s premiere (7.4 rating) and down 38% from the 2011 premiere (9.7 rating). Next […]

February begins with a night that can’t even find a single 2 rating. CBS:  UNDERCOVER BOSS had one of the two 1.9s of the night, steady with its last airing.  BLUE BLOODS and CSI NY were both at 1.5, which was down slightly for the first and even for the second. ABC:  The other 1.9 […]

  OPENINGS:  THE MARKSMAN (Open Road) allows Liam Neeson to lay claim to being the most prolific movie star of the pandemic, following on the releases of Honest Thief and the smaller-scale Made In Italy.  Despite a holiday weekend opening, Marksman‘s 3-day $3.2M start is below the $4.1M for Honest Thief, with a 4-day total […]

>Super 8 beats the forecast with a solid opening.  The weekend top 12 are looking to be down a bit from 2010.Super 8 opened with $13.2 million on Friday, and it looks like the JJ Abrams film will gross almost $41 million from Friday-Sunday.  The film is headed for $118 million in North America when […]

Thanks to the State of the Union Address, there was virtually no original programming on the broadcast networks last night. ABC:  You’d think things were set up perfectly for THE TASTE to overperform, with nothing but reruns against it in the pre-speech 8PM slot, but it only managed to tie CBS for the hour, falling […]

>Weekend box office actuals and summer movie draft standings through Sunday will be posted later this afternoon after final numbers for the weekend are available.  Please check back in the early afternoon Pacific time.

  We’re less than 24 hours away from that exciting moment when the first negative tweet about Seth McFarlane’s performance as this year’s Oscar host appears, so it’s time to go all-in and make some final choices.  Here, then, with no more knowledge or record of success than anyone else, are our Academy Award predictions […]

> Premieres Wednesday 10PM on USA:  Change the Channel NECESSARY ROUGHNESS departs from the USA Network formula in several ways:  our heroine Dani Santino (Callie Thorne) is the mother of teenagers, she doesn’t work undercover or take on wacky identities, she has no extraordinary abilities other than empathy, and her wise-cracking best friend isn’t around […]