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A smiley face for one network and a frowny one for another, on the third night this week disrupted by postseason baseball.
ABC: Everything came up fairly rosy last night at the Alphabet. SUBURGATORY should be inches away from a full season pick-up after its third consecutive strong outing, and even better, REVENGE went in the opposite direction from Pan Am, and had a nice bump from last week. That might be partly due to CSI being hurt by the unexpected baseball game at 10PM, but ABC will take it. Combine all that with the stellar MODERN FAMILY number and an impressive increase for HAPPY ENDINGS (which also might be partly attributable to the absence of X Factor on FOX), and it was a pleasant evening at ABC.NBC: Here’s where NBC is these days: their good news last night was that the repeat of WHITNEY with its 1.3 decisively outrated the new episodes of Free Agents that it replaced. (Incidentally, BBCAmerica has started airing the original British Free Agents–albeit in heavily edited form–and it’s a tutorial in how a network can duplicate a show’s premise, basic characters and even storylines and turn it into something completely different and far worse.) UP ALL NIGHT, with its full season order, declined to a lousy 2.0, while the best that can be said for HARRY’S LAW and SVU is that they were consistent.
CBS: SURVIVOR and CRIMINAL MINDS barely moved from last week. The CSI decline was a little steeper, but as noted, that show faced unusual competition in its timeslot.
FOX: Even though a network benefits financially from a long playoff series, at this point FOX is probably hoping Texas can just win its next game today/tonight/whenever it stops raining and put the network out of its misery. Last night’s unexpected primetime game was down at least 20% from X Factor, and that will probably get worse when final numbers are released later today.
CW: Repeats of RINGER (back ordered yesterday) barely kept the lights on with a 0.4, which was even with last week’s H8R and didn’t affect AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL.
Tonight NBC will find out if the extra reruns this week have helped Whitney and Prime Suspect at all, and CBS will hope for an uptick from Person Of Interest.
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