Last week, the glamorous part of the network “Upfronts” took place, largely for viewer and media purposes:  hordes of new shows were announced, stars were trotted out, executives madly spun this past season’s numbers so that every decline looked like a triumph, gala parties were held.  This week, however, the real Upfronts kick into […]

  NOTE:  Season To Date and Network Week-to-Week Charts Are Below With today’s CW announcement that THE ORIGINALS, REIGN and THE TOMORROW PEOPLE have received full back orders, we know where we are with just about all this season’s fall premieres.  (HOSTAGES, BETRAYAL and ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND, all technically “short season” shows, […]

  The networks have announced most of their midseason plans by now, issuing back orders or canceling the series introduced to great fanfare just 6 weeks ago and shuffling some time slots, and one thing has becoming increasingly clear–and just plain increasing:  more and more, the networks are content with ratings under a 2.0 in […]

  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 […]

  So… how’s it going? We’ve completed 2 full weeks of the 2013-14 broadcast TV season, and while there are still a few arrivals on the way (notably ABC’s Once Upon A Time in Wonderland and the NBC Friday line-up), we’ve seen enough to reach some early conclusions.  Let’s take a look. First, the big […]

  All this week, we’ve been giving you our predicted fall network ratings for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday.  Let’s wind up our week of forecasts with an overview of how the fall is likely to go for each of the networks in summary.  We don’t see any precipitous drops, although we also […]

  From a predicting point of view, Sunday is sort of an anti-climactic end to our week of fall TV ratings forecasts, since the winner is obvious and there are few changes from last fall.  (See our more interesting predictions for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)   Still, here’s how we–that being former head of […]