Thursday, December 8, 2011

SpecTrulation, Grimm


The second edition of SpecTrulation looks at Grimm, the new NBC genre drama which will get a special Thursday airing tonight.


TRUE says: The last two episodes of Grimm (which rated at a level that seemed relatively stable) averaged a 1.93 TRUE. The show will move to Thursday 10/9c, where Prime Suspect has averaged a +15% Sitch this season. Since the timeslot was tougher the last couple weeks, we'll conservatively reduce that to +10%. 1.93 + (10% *1.93) = a 2.1 A18-49 rating.

Spot says: I think it'd be pretty cool if Grimm actually got a 2.1 (or even better), mostly because I'd like to see the pressure ramp up for a more permanent move. But I'm pretty hesitant to go ahead and predict that will happen. I think what it's done on Friday is relatively impressive, but there are a few things working against this airing:

1) The Hiatus. This kind of show tends to Truly drop across a hiatus, especially in its relative infancy. (For a recent example, the ridiculously steady Once Upon a Time left the air for just two weeks and dropped double digits.) Grimm won't have aired for nearly three weeks. This kinda bleeds into #2 below, but you'd particularly rather have aired a recent episode for a special airing situation, because you want to be able to promote it to the show's regular audience. I'm usually not a big buyer on a lot of the "people didn't know it was on!" arguments, but it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to say it could make an impact here.

2) The Special Airing Effect. Even not coming off a hiatus, almost every show gets Truly weaker in one-off airings on special nights. Just look at The X Factor's Tuesday and Sunday airings this season. The closest Friday-to-midweek analog within the last year is Blue Bloods' four-week Wednesday turn last season. For the most part, it didn't do as well as the TRUE number wanted it to.

I am going to weigh the above, but I won't weigh them too heavily. Also, it may help that there's no really compatible competition. So I'll be (probably) somewhat optimistic and say a 1.9 A18-49 rating.

I created True Strength this summer because I wanted an effective way to compare different timeslots across the primetime TV landscape. To take advantage of that, I'm going to do one of these posts called "SpecTrulation" each time a show undergoes a move to a drastically different situation. It'll be good for me to highlight these anyway because it's how the ratings responded in these types of drastic moves that formed much of the foundations of True Strength last year. Presumably it'll be that way again in future updates.

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