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On a night without a lot of movement, sometimes standing still works out for the best.
FOX: Zooey Deschanel may not be a mainstream movie star, but her Manic Pixie Dream Girl charms are definitely making her one on TV: NEW GIRL (see our Pilot + 1 Review) is just a hair behind 2 Broke Girls as the biggest hit of the new season (and 1 of them should be the first to grab a back-order of Spring episodes). Even more impressively, while Broke Girls is running essentially even with its strong How I Met Your Mother lead-in, New Girl had to do a lot of the heavy lifting itself. All that’s keeping FOX from spending the morning doing handstands is that so far, New Girl is a smash in isolation: GLEE is settling into its new post-blockbuster, sub-4 rating world (as to last night’s episode: the series is so willfully strange that sometimes the relatively naturalistic episodes are the ones that seem oddest), and RAISING HOPE is only slightly above last season’s average.CBS: The NCIS franchise won 3 of its 4 half-hours last night, falling into 2d place only to New Girl and almost dead even with last week’s numbers. But UNFORGETTABLE (read our Pilot + 1 Review) can’t afford to fade much more–it’s already running even with The Good Wife‘s numbers in that slot, and those are the numbers that got Good Wife moved to another night. On CBS, even winning your time slot isn’t a guarantee of success if you squander your lead-in, and Unforgettable lost almost 40% of the NCIS: LA number.
NBC: BIGGEST LOSER is down an awful 30% from last season, and since it fills 2 hours of the night, Tuesday is basically cooked (albeit in a low-fat, nutritional way) for the network, much as Sing-Off is killing their Mondays. The only shred of good news is that PARENTHOOD, while down from last season’s average, is holding steady (another great episode last night), and suddenly finds itself very much in the 10PM race against weak competition on the other networks. For NBC, that’s a “hit”.
ABC: The 8PM DANCING WITH THE STARS special is just a place-holder until Tim Allen rides to the rescue in a few weeks (they hope), but it’s certainly not keeping the timeslot warm. The Dancing results show is a disaster, down 30% from last year’s, and the same is true for BODY OF PROOF, which is getting slammed by the direct competition of Unforgettable.
CW: The good news is that there wasn’t any bad news: Ringer, despite being a serialized show (and despite another disappointing episode) stopped bleeding and held steady at last week’s 0.9, and 90210 even went up a tick to 0.8. Those numbers aren’t much, but they’re where the CW is these days.
Things to watch for tonight: whether Revenge can sustain its impressive opening (look for our Pilot + 1 Review), and whether Up All Night can avoid any more slippage for NBC at 8PM.
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