Without The Voice to support it, Smash started its second season with a ratings trainwreck to match the creative disaster that is the show.  Read Mitch Salem’s review here. Half-hour ratings for network television last night are shown below.  Most notably, Smash started at 1.3 rating with adults 18-49 (already down from its very modest lead-in, Betty White’s 2nd Annual 90th Birthday — […]

CBS is going to win this season, but not on the strength of its new series. CBS:  The one area where CBS has been weak this season (although no weaker than anyone else) has been in launching new series, with only Elementary having any particular success.  That didn’t change last night with the “preview” of […]

  The night belonged to country music.   CBS:  With virtually no competition on any other network, the ACADEMY OF COUNTRY MUSIC AWARDS romped to a 4.3, easily winning the night and up from 3.1 last year.  However, without last week’s NCAA overrun bump, 60 MINUTES was down 1.1 from last week to 1.4. NBC:  […]

A fairly typical week at the top of the adult 18-49 rankings, with The Voice the top broadcast network program and Duck Dynasty the top cable entry.  But the riveting events in Boston last week also had an impact in the middle of the week’s chart.  NBC’s special Monday night at 10:00 pm (the day of the bombings at […]

  Scandal is on its way to becoming a phenomenon. ABC:  With the season finale still to come, last night’s SCANDAL set a series record 3.2.  That was up an incredible 0.6 from last week, up 0.3 from its lead-in, and towers over anything else airing at 10PM on network TV.  For its part, GREY’S […]

  The same number of people–2.4 million–watched Sunday’s HBO premiere of BEHIND THE CANDELABRA, its Liberace biography directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, as watched the series finale of Smash on NBC, a network with triple the available audience.  (And another 1 million people tuned for the rebroadcast of Candelabra […]

DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary 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). COMPARISONS TO SIMILAR NIGHTS: Preliminary adult 18-49 ratings versus the same night […]

  The Season 6 premiere of HBO’s TRUE BLOOD wasn’t quite as hearty as last year’s launch, with 4.5M total viewers for the initial broadcast (demo details aren’t available yet, although it should be around a 2.5 in 18-49s), compared to 5.2M last season, plus another 1.1M viewers for the 11PM rebroadcast.  That’s below last […]