CW’s experiment with historical romance didn’t get off to a great start. CW:  An 0.8 isn’t a terrible number for CW, so if REIGN can manage to hold there, it has a chance.  But its debut was 0.2 below the launch of The Originals, and a big 0.4 under last year’s premiere of Beauty & […]

  The night’s new shows still aren’t catching on. ABC:  BACK TO THE GAME was given a particularly strong lead-in with a TOY STORY OF TERROR special that had a 3.0, up 0.8 from last week’s The Middle.  Still, it could only hold even at 1.8.  A very good episode of MODERN FAMILY was up […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here. REIGN:  Thursday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert The CW is often–and rightly–considered a network of very limited ambitions, with just two modes of operation:  rom-com soap and supernatural soap.  But its new REIGN, while well fortified with suds, is as big a swing for the […]

  AFTERNOON UPDATE:  All the 8PM shows except THE ORIGINALS were adjusted up 0.1 in final numbers, so their position relative to each other stayed the same–but ABC must be relieved that AGENTS OF SHIELD declined just 0.1 for the week.  At 9PM, SUPERNATURAL went down 0.1, making ORIGINALS the highest -rated CW show of […]

  One guess what’s on top.  The surprise, though, is how little the walkers fed off their competition. AMC:  We already know that THE WALKING DEAD literally topped almost everything else in primetime television all season with a 8.2 in 18-49s.  (Sunday Night Football was adjusted up to 8.4 in the final numbers to edge […]

  CBS’s temporary fix to its Monday problem both worked and didn’t. CBS:  Back in its original 8:30PM timeslot behind HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (which was even at 3.0), 2 BROKE GIRLS rose 0.2 to 2.5, a big improvement over what the late We Are Men had been doing there.  But after a 2.2 […]

  AdWeek has published its annual survey of the actual prices advertisers agreed to pay in the Upfronts for 30-second spots in the network primetime line-ups, and as usual, it’s filled with fascinating information.  It helps, though, to keep the following in mind: A typical network hour contains about 20 30-second national ad spots.  The […]

  What do we know that we didn’t know last week? Here’s the big-picture view of where each network’s primetime average stands in comparison to 2012-13 after 3 full weeks of the season: NBC: 2.84 (+0.9%) CBS: 2.18 ( -4.6%) FOX: 2.13 (-5.9%) ABC: 2.06 (-0.3%) CW:  0.50 (-1.7%)  Note, CW didn’t begin premiering its […]