There’s always an audience for some stories, and while History Channel’s miniseries distillation of THE BIBLE from Mark Burnett and Roma Downey wasn’t quite at the network’s Hatfields & McCoys level of blockbuster success, it was–pardon the expression–damn close.  Hatfields was watched by 13.9M people in its premiere, 4.8M of them 18-49, while Bible […]

  Even at HBO, someone has to watch your show.  The network announced today that ENLIGHTENED won’t be returning for a third season.  The Mike White/Laura Dern dramedy earned its share of praise, but its Season 2 finale was watched by 200,000 people–and that’s not 18-49s, that’s the total number of people in America who […]

Here is how the week is shaping up for the top cable telecasts (in bold) and top broadcast programs (in regular type) for this week through Thursday, ranked by adult 18-49 rating.  The complete ranking for last week is provided on the left for comparison.

This weekend, the NBA playoffs got off to a solid start, with the eight games across two days and three networks up 6% from the same time periods last year.  The Lakers, Heat and Celtics/Knicks all broke a 3.5 household rating this past weekend.   Five of the weekend’s games were up significantly versus last […]

  In FOX’s new line-up, ALMOST HUMAN will take over the Monday 8PM slot from Bones post-baseball, then serve as lead-in to first Sleepy Hollow and then The Following.  It hails from Bad Robot, JJ Abrams’s mecca of genre TV and movies, and the Fringe connection is even stronger, because it’s written by J.H. Wyman, […]

  Another low Friday. 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 follows the chart. ABC:  […]

It was another dim night for most of network TV. FOX:  AMERICAN IDOL tied its Wednesday series low 2.9 for the third week in a row.  That was down 2 full ratings points from last year’s parallel night.  Last night, instead of a 2d hour of Idol, an episode of SO YOU THINK YOU CAN […]

  NBC’s decision, announced today, to bring back its series HANNIBAL for a second season (probably again at midseason) provides some insight into how the network television business has changed, and will continue changing.  By any traditional ratings analysis, renewing Hannibal would seem as insane as one of its many darkly murderous characters:  although technically […]