Week of
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12 articles
NFL, “Loser” Put NBC Back Into The Running
19 hours ago
Football continued to dominate the national ratings last week as NBC's Sunday Night Football coverage of the New York Giants-Philadelphia Eagles contest easily grabbed the top spot on the Nielsen list with 20.88 million viewers. CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation returned as the top-rated entertainment program with 16.43 million viewers, just edging out CBS's The Mentalist with 16.37 million and the network's 60 Minutes with 16.24 million. A repeat of CBS' NCIS rounded out the top five with 15.09 million viewers. Neither Fox nor ABC managed to place a single show in the top ten. Aside from football, NBC landed the season finale of The Biggest Loser in 10th place but no other show in the top 20, except for a Friday Dateline episode titled "The Secret Life of Tiger Woods." For the week, CBS handily beat the competition with an average 6.6 rating and an 11 share. NBC placed second with a 5.5/9. ABC came in third with a
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DVR’S Changing Viewing Habits
19 hours ago
Appearing to clash with a study issued just last week by Nielsen Research indicating that fewer than 1 percent of viewers use DVRs to watch programs at a later time, Horizon Media issued its own study Wednesday concluding that DVRs are permanently altering viewing habits. According to the Horizon study, details of which were published Tuesday on the Advertising Age website, 11 fall season programs were regularly "time-shifted" by viewers this season, versus three last year. They included Fox's House, which was watched on DVRs by 5.04 million viewers. ABC's Grey's Anatomy was time-shifted by close to 4.97 million viewers. NBC's The Office was recorded by 3.81 million. If accurate, the figures are significant. House averages a same-day audience of about 13 million; Grey's, 16 million; and The Office, 9 million.
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PTC Urges Members To Protest “Family Guy”
19 hours ago
The Parents Television Council, the group that has frequently spearheaded indecency complaints to the FCC, has called on its members to protest last Sunday's episode of Fox's Family Guy in which a stripper gives a lap dance to one of the characters, who becomes so aroused that he falls over with a heart attack. "Apparently Fox must believe that because the program is animated it can air anything it wants on Family Guy no matter how inappropriate or indecent," PTC President Tim Winter.said in a statement. "Fox hides behind satire and animation as an 'excuse' to air the foulest material imaginable, but Fox needs to learn that broadcast decency laws apply to all broadcast programming aired during the time when children are most likely to be watching, and we urge our members to file indecency complaints with the Federal Communications Commission over this episode."
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Oral Roberts, Father Of Televangelism, Dead At 91
19 hours ago
Oral Roberts, one of the first fundamentalist preachers to recognize the potential of television to build a vast religious following, has died after reportedly suffering injuries from a fall near his home in Newport Beach, CA. He was 91. In a statement, Richard Roberts said that his father "was the only man of his generation to build a worldwide ministry, an accredited university, and a medical school." Roberts sometimes raised funds by telling his viewers that he needed money to expand his operations because God had told him to do so, and that if he failed to raise the funds God would "call me home." In the mid-'80s, his medical school -- always a surprise given his faith-healing credentials -- failed after a few years. Years ago, a reporter, after questioning Roberts about criticism that his faith-healing claims had led many to believe they had been cured of disease when they had not,
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“Dexter” Kills In Season Finale
15 December 2009 11:47 AM, PST
The season finale of Dexter Sunday night set a ratings record for an original series on Showtime as 2.58 million viewers tuned in at 9:00 p.m. and an additional 508,000 for the repeat at 11:00 p.m. It was the first time any Showtime original drew more than 3 million viewers on a single night. It was also the biggest audience for any Showtime telecast since the 1999 Mike Tyson/Orlin Norris fight in Las Vegas that lasted mere seconds. Dexter's total audience on Sunday represented a 71-percent increase over last season's finale. The strong showing also helped boost viewing numbers for the finale of Showtime Californication, which followed and drew 1.1 million.
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Americans Spending More Time With Their TV Sets
15 December 2009 11:46 AM, PST
Although ratings studies have failed to establish that the television audience is expanding as the recession compels more and more families to find their entertainment at home, a new study by financial advisers Deloitte has found that one third of Americans rank watching TV as their favorite media activity -- up 26 percent from a year ago. The same study found that three-quarters of Americans claimed that the economic downturn had forced them to reduce spending on movie tickets, concerts, sports events, DVDs and video games. In an interview with Reuters, Ed Moran, director of insights and innovation at Deloitte, said that television is "a big beneficiary" of the recession.
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Without Tiger Golf Telecast Tanks
15 December 2009 11:45 AM, PST
Without Tiger Woods on the greens, just 1.2 million viewers tuned in to NBC's telecast of the Chevron World Challenge, down 54 percent from a year ago, which featured Woods. "An unexpected drop in ratings is clearly negative for everyone broadcasting golf," Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research, told today's (Tuesday) Los Angeles Times. CBS carries the Masters and PGA Championship; NBC, the U.S. Open; Espn, the British Open and the Golf Channel televises about 150 events. Greenfield noted that while the networks will be hit significantly by the loss of viewers, the entire value of Comcast's Golf Channel could be undermined. However, a spokesman for the channel downplayed the impact. "We have a core audience that comes to watch golf no matter who is playing," Golf Channel spokesman Dan Higgins told the newspaper. "Tiger didn't play a full schedule in 2008 or 2009 [because of a knee injury], so we've gone through this before." In a related development,
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British May Regulate Reality Shows Featuring Kids
15 December 2009 11:44 AM, PST
The British government has launched a review of regulations governing children's appearances on reality TV programs, the London Independent reported today (Tuesday). Ed Balls, secretary of state for children, schools and families, told the newspaper that several program producers appear to be using children "to keep pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable to provide shock value for viewers and push up ratings." He particularly cited one program, Boys and Girls Alone, in which 20 children were left without supervision to create their own community, with several of them ending up fighting and crying. He also singled out another reality show, Wife Swap, in which parents swap families.
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Sponsors Out Of The Woods’ Ads
14 December 2009 11:56 AM, PST
CNN, Fox News, the nightly network news programs, and the morning talk shows, all of which had resisted jumping on the Tiger Woods scandal, finally did so over the weekend as the global consulting firm Accenture announced it would not renew its endorsement contract with the golfer, which several experts said was worth $7-8 million, nearly 10 percent of Woods's total endorsement earnings. Woods himself said in a statement that he plans to take an indefinite break from the PGA Tour, a move that was expected to result in plummeting ratings for golf coverage, thereby costing television networks millions of dollars in ad revenue. Marketing executives appeared on the air to urge Woods to make a public appearance and respond to the gossip. Meanwhile, the NBC magazine Dateline showed no reluctance to exploit the Woods scandal for ratings value. Friday night's special edition titled "The Secret Life of Tiger Woods," fronted by Josh Mankiewicz,
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Glenn Beck In New To-do Over Gold Sponsor
14 December 2009 11:55 AM, PST
Despite a denial by Fox News Channel that commentator Glenn Beck has been acting as a paid spokesman for Goldline International, which sells gold coins, the New York Times said today that an advertisement by Goldline had listed Beck as a paid spokesman until very recently. Days ago, the newspaper said, the words "paid spokesman" were replaced with "radio sponsor." Mark Albarian, president of Goldline, told the newspaper that the words had been changed because his company, although a sponsor of Beck's radio program, did not pay Beck directly.
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“Jersey Shore” Jumps In Ratings
14 December 2009 11:54 AM, PST
Demonstrating once again that protests over controversial television shows often boost ratings for those shows rather than harm them, the second episode of MTV's Jersey Shore jumped in the ratings after Italian-American organizations and individuals denounced it and demanded that the series be dropped. The episode drew 2.1 million viewers, up more than 50 percent from its debut telecast a week earlier. Meanwhile, TVGuide.com reported over the weekend that MTV removed a scene from the next episode of the series showing one of the main participants, Nicole "Nooki" Polizzi being punched in the face. The scene, however, quickly popped up on YouTube and went viral, the TV website reported. A statement issued by the cable channel explained why it had removed the scene. "What happened to Snooki," it said, "was a crime and obviously extremely disturbing." It said that the scene had also been removed from YouTube.
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Cowell Proposes A Political “Idol”
14 December 2009 11:53 AM, PST
Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge and the producer/judge on Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor, has suggested that a similar competition format could be applied to a political TV series. In a BBC interview, Cowell said that he was considering producing a "political X Factor" in the U.K. in which major issues would be debated and the public would phone in their votes before the upcoming parliamentary election. He suggested that the initial series could focus on "five or six big issues which I think are really, really important in people's lives." Cowell, perhaps Britain's most successful TV entrepreneur, hinted that such a show might allow him to refocus his own career. "It would be a good way for me to get involved in politics," he said. Meanwhile, the finale of this season's The X Factor on Sunday night, which was won by 18-year-old Joe McElderry,
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