Saturday night’s grudge match between NCAA college football on ABC (Notre Dame at Oklahoma) ended up with a 2.9 rating with Adults 18-49, actually beating Game 3 of the World Series on FOX (San Francisco at Detroit) at a 2.8 rating. Among all viewers (aged 2 or over), older-skewing baseball had the edge, however.  Game […]

The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between October 22 and October 28 grossed a mediocre $119 million, even with the four-year average for the week and down 3% from the same week last year.    The past six weeks are now 7% above the four-year average box office […]

  ABC should send a nice thank-you note to NBC, because the marginal but sufficient success of THE NEIGHBORS and SCANDAL, both of which received full-season 22 episode orders today, is directly due to the weakness of the Peacock competition.  (Note:  Scandal needed a back-order to reach 22 episodes because although it started last season, […]

  AMC has renewed its building-the-railroad melodrama HELL ON WHEELS for a 10-episode 3rd season.  The renewal was far from a sure thing, as the show has indifferent ratings among 18-49s (the recent season finale was at 0.5, which was around where the series usually landed where it didn’t have a strong lead-in), but it […]

  Once upon a time, there was a single-camera sitcom pilot at NBC called UP ALL NIGHT.  It was the story of Reagan and Chris Brinkley (Christina Applegate and Will Arnett), who had to cope with becoming new parents and the resulting loss of their “coolness” factor.  Chris was a stay-at-home dad, while Reagan worked […]

The World Series survives another year… but only with the help of football. FOX:  There’s a certain irony in the fact that WORLD SERIES GAME 4 avoided record lows (as detailed in Mitch Metcalf’s Daily Ratings Report today) mainly because the late afternoon down-to-the-wire NY Giants vs. Dallas Cowboys NFL FOOTBALL game gave baseball a […]

A quick update. SEASON TO DATE through five full weeks (32 nights of official ratings and 3 nights of adjusted fast nationals), NBC is averaging a 2.73 rating in prime time (up 19% from the same period last year). FOX is now second with a 2.37 (down 21%). CBS is now third with a 2.27 (down […]

It looks like NBC suffered its first Sunday defeat of the new season.  The Sunday Night Football game certainly out-rated Game 4 of the World Series, but FOX built a commanding lead in the 7 pm hour alone with the controversial (and widely-viewed) end of the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys NFL game.  ABC has stabilized […]