In recent years, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film has come to stand for not much more than a fair level of craftsmanship and a comfortable pitch of moral predicament (The Secret In Their Eyes, Departures, and The Counterfeiters are the most recent undistinguished winners).  This year’s winner, Susanne Bier’s IN A BETTER WORLD, […]

    I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT – Not Even For Free:  You Don’t Want To Know   The recent movie I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT most resembles is The Nanny Diaries, which is odd because it was a flop for Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company, and yet Weinstein’s studio […]

  Nothing moved more than a tenth. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary live+same day key advertiser demographics (adult 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 ratings), audience skews (women 18-49, men 18-49 and adults 50+ shares) and total viewership (thousands of people over the age of 2). Ratings analysis and […]

  Below are the ratings in key demos for Wednesday’s Top 25 original cable telecasts, along with a few lower-rated shows of interest.  If you’d like us to add any series to the latter list, please let us know.  Some context and analysis follow the chart. TEEN MOM (MTV) topped the night but lost a […]

  TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Worth A Ticket – An Epic of Betrayals   John LeCarre is (I guess one should say “arguably”) the greatest of all spy novelists, and his 1974 TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is “arguably” his finest work.  Incredibly, the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation lived up to the level of the novel, […]

Here are the weekend sports ratings for Saturday and Sunday March 11-12, 2017.  Eligible programs include sporting events on broadcast and cable networks (minimum audience size 300K P2+).  Programs are grouped by sport and ranked within each sport by P2+ audience size. For comparison, here is the same chart for the same weekend last year, March 12-13, […]

NETWORK UPDATE:  SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL adjusted up 0.9 to 8.5.  On CBS, where the schedule slid 50 minutes due to afternoon football overrun, BIG BROTHER gained 0.3 to 2.5.  The MISS AMERICA PAGEANT grew 0.2 to 1.7, and the COUNTDOWN special that preceded it was up 0.1 to 0.7. THE STRAIN (FX) topped SUNDAY CABLE, […]

    THE LORAX:  Not Even For Free – A Seussian Mess   It may not be pretty, but surely it’s true–Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just […]