>Big time professional sports dominate the top of this week’s cable ratings chart.  The NFL Draft turned in an excellent 3.3 rating with Adults 18-49 and nearly 7 million viewers 2+.  The Draft finished in third place in the 8:00 half hour on Thursday (behind only Big Bang Theory on CBS with a 4.1 rating […]

  We’re continuing our look at NBC’s crop of trailers for its fall shows (apart from The Blacklist, the network doesn’t seem to be releasing pieces for its midseason series right now), and next up is the return of a TV icon (for those who were watching TV in 1967):  IRONSIDE. What becomes increasingly clear […]

  So much for those “safe” 2d position pilot deals for the cast:  while ABC is, indeed, canceling COUGAR TOWN, the show isn’t going to that badly-titled place in the sky.  Instead, TBS has ordered a 4th season of the show, to go along with its reruns of the existing episodes.  The new season will […]

  When you’re CBS, you don’t have to do much.   J   Let’s take a look, night by night: MONDAY:  CBS confounded expectations by not expanding its comedy presence on Thursdays.  So it was less important that the sitcom moving over there have a long potential lifespan, which allowed the network to instead shift […]

>AMC’s Walking Dead is the new king of the weekly cable ratings chart, with a terrific 4.2 Adult 18-49 rating for Sunday’s season premiere.  Read more on the Walking Dead premiere here.  The rest of the top-rated cable programs are pretty much unchanged.  While Jersey Shore continues its downward trend, the other MTV hit, Teen […]

>When all the Sked PLAYERS gather in New York, the pilots have been screened for the network’s own executives, but the only “real people” who’ve seen them are those participating in Research testing.  The results of those tests become the only “objective” data regarding the appeal of a given show, so they’re a critical part […]

  BIG BROTHER’s return didn’t challenge AMERICA’S GOT TALENT. 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 […]

> Welcome back to Network Scorecard, where we consider the perplexing case of AMERICAN IDOL. FOX:  It’s now clear that the biggest story of the 2011-12 television season is the slump in established reality-competition franchises.  Idol joins Dancing With the Stars and The Biggest Loser with a nearly 30% decline from last year’s Wednesday average.  […]