One-third of last year’s viewers have left.
FOX: The next-to-last AMERICAN IDOL of the season, airing against repeats on every other network, scored a 4.2, which gave FOX the nightly win but was down a whopping 2.2 rating points from last year’s parallel show. GLEE‘s season finale, given that mighty lead-in, earned a 3.0, solidly up 0.5 from last week and the show’s best number in months–but down 1.8 rating points from last year’s season finale (about 38%). If the trend continues, tonight’s IDOL finale should get around a big but very mortal 4.7 rating, down from last year’s 7.0
ABC: Similarly, the season finale of DANCING WITH THE STARS was up almost 50% from last week (3.2 compared to 2.2), but that was down from 4.5 last year, a decline of about 30%.
NBC: AMERICA’S GOT TALENT‘s 3.2 beat both the first hour of the Dancing finale and Glee, and it was only slightly down from last year’s final hour of The Biggest Loser. A special Dateline at 10PM managed only 1.6, behind even CBS’s rerun.
CBS: The Eye let the other networks fight it out last night, airing reruns of the NCIS shows. The 1.8 score for the 10PM repeat was as good a number as many first-run series have been doing in the 10PM slot all season.
CW: Viewers are treating THE LA COMPLEX like something noxious that might get into their eyes if they watch: last nights 0.2 came in below a rerun of HART OF DIXIE.
Tonight closes the book on the 2011-12 broadcast network season. Squaring off against the Idol finale will be a night of ABC finales (except for a Modern Family repeat at 8:30PM subbing for the already-done Suburgatory), and at 10PM when Idol is done, NBC airs the SVU season finale.
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