Thanks to football, Sunday nights in the fall can be very misleading.  NBC will walk away with the night between September and December with an astounding 6.5 rating each Sunday in prime time during the NFL season.  For 18 weeks, this is the highest-rated night on any network. Further, the Sunday prime time ratings for […]

> DISCLAIMER: These initial impressions are based on the clips (usually 3-5 minutes) released by the networks to use in their Upfront presentations and for promos.  They’re chosen to sell the show, not to accurately represent it.  So take the reactions below with a large satchel of salt–we may well feel differently about these shows […]

> NEW SHOWS in Caps.  New Time Periods in Italics. WHAT WE LIKE:  It looks like another strong schedule from #1 Fox (and very close to our predicted schedule — more on that later).  Fox is very confident in its comedy development and is using strong assets like Glee and X Factor to launch new […]

  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 […]

Monday night features the premiere of NBC’s temporary schedule until The Voice returns.  The Biggest Loser settles into its new night (after a preview tonight featuring the return of trainer Jillian Michaels) from 8-10 pm, followed by the premiere of new drama Deception.  ABC premieres The Bachelor directly against Biggest Loser and follows that up with a new episode of Castle.  FOX’s schedule includes […]

>The new television season is here.  The kids are back in school, summer is a distant memory, and the Emmy telecast has ended.  It’s time for the networks to unleash a flurry of season premieres and series debuts in the span of a few weeks.  Tonight, ABC and NBC launch their new Monday schedules intact, […]

  Our journey through the fall primetime schedule–and by “our,” I mean former head of NBC Scheduling Mitch Metcalf, former head of NBC Current Programming Ted Frank and myself–takes us to what may be the most competitive night of the new season:  Wednesdays.  (You can find our predictions here for Monday and Tuesday.)   Our […]

  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 […]