A happy Halloween for Grimm. NBC:  The 1.5 for busted pilot MOCKINGBIRD LANE probably isn’t enough to bring the costly project back from the grave.  However, the boost it gave GRIMM–at 1.9, the highest-rated show of the night, with its biggest number by far this season–provides a suggestion as to how NBC should be programming […]

The winning streak is over after four straight up weekends.  Weekend #43 will just about match the multi-year average for this weekend and actually under-perform the same weekend last year.  None of the openers this weekend will make an impact on the box office beyond next week, while Argo continues to quietly pack them in […]

  Preliminary numbers at Deadline show a tightly-bunched, none too impressive weekend underway at the boxoffice.  ARGO (Warners), SILENT HILL:  REVELATION (Open Road), CLOUD ATLAS (Warners) and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (Paramount) are all clustered around $3.5-4M for the day, which means it will be a question of dueling estimates on Saturday morning.  When the dust […]

In the official ratings, Game 2 of the World Series came in at a 3.5 rating with Adults 18-49, above the 2.9 fast national rating and even higher than our adjusted 3.3 rating from this morning.  The World Series remains a disaster, however. Last night is clearly the lowest rated Game 2 in history with […]

Yesterday we did our homework and reviewed the groundrules for calculating the meaning of primetime network ad rates listed by Ad Age in its yearly survey.  So… all that being said, where are the networks making their money this season?  Or not? A quick refresher on some critical numbers:  the typical 1-hour TV episode has […]

Several TV institutions tottered last night. ABC:  It’s going to be awfully hard to justify a back order for LAST RESORT, which plunged 0.4 to a terrible 1.3.  Perhaps even scarier for ABC was GREY’S ANATOMY.  The show has been steadily sinking since its season premiere (last night’s episode was the first of the fall […]

World Series Game 2 is losing to the CBS Thursday lineup in the fast nationals (2.9 to 3.2 with Adults 18-49), but the game should rise to about a 3.3 in the official nationals when the Western live viewing is tabulated correctly.  This assumes a fast-to-official nationals increase of about 14%, similar to Game 1’s […]

  Advertising Age has issued its yearly survey of the actual prices (more or less) being charged by networks for 30-second national ads in their primetime programming, which allows us to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations about just how profitable each individual show and network may be.  We’ll get to the network-by-network calculus tomorrow, but today, […]