The absence of the NFL Draft didn’t help all that much. FOX:  The losses keep accumulating for AMERICAN IDOL, which last night had its lowest-ever regular episode at 2.5, down 0.3 from last week, and equal to the season low for a Thursday X Factor.  Incredibly, the show that spent a decade as a […]

  The nasty parade of season and series lows continued last night. FOX:  AMERICAN IDOL crossed 2 ugly milestones last night.   Its 2.8 rating (down half a point from last week), apart from being an all-time Wednesday low for the series (including its first season, when it ran during the summer), marked the first time […]

  A few notable items from today’s cable news: On the heels of a season-best rating last Sunday, HBO has renewed VEEP for a third season of 10 episodes.  Veep‘s been a very sturdy success for the network, considerably outrating its splashier sister show Girls this year (although, to be sure, Girls didn’t have a […]

Iron Man 3 will push the 18th weekend of the year to well over $210 million for the top 12 films, fully 19% better than the average for the comparable weekends recently but still 15% below the same weekend last year, when The Avengers exploded. Opening at over 4,000 theaters Friday (a very high theater […]

  NBC shook things up last night, to mixed effect. NBC:  A 2-hour THE VOICE hurt the 9PM competition, but resulted in a 3.7 for itself, the lowest Voice rating in weeks (down 0.4 from last Tuesday).  Putting GRIMM at 10PM gave the network a 2.0, its best rating in that slot since Parenthood ended its season (the […]

  FRIDAY STARZ:  DA VINCI’S DEMONS held steady in Week 3 with 18-49s at 0.2, but it tumbled quite a bit in the older-skewing total viewers metric, falling from 503K viewers to 382K.  (And this, remember, is after Starz swore last week that the only reason the show fell sharply from its premiere–when it had 1M […]

Updated weekly broadcast and cable program rankings.

  Despite modest bumps for FOX’s season finales, last night featured an alarming number of season and series lows. FOX:  Both BONES and THE FOLLOWING were up in their season finales, the former by 0.1 to 2.1 and the latter by 0.2 to 2.6.  That still didn’t get them past their season average numbers, although […]