WHAT MATTERS:
- Spring Sundays kicked off in terrible fashion for the broadcasters as Celebrity Apprentice returned at the celebrity edition's lowest numbers yet (and a whooping 35% below last year's premiere). And even with a finals uptick, ABC could only barely exceed Zero Hour numbers with the two-hour premiere of Red Widow. Though I nailed the spread between the two, that was only because I thought both of them would be 0.4 to 0.5 stronger. Yikes.
- ABC also has a fast-growing Once Upon a Time problem, as the show actually fell into a tie with its awards season low point. This show got a 3.4 a year ago!
- It wasn't quite as bad on the other two networks, where The Amazing Race bounced all the way back from its Oscar dip last week and The Simpsons also bounced back a bit from event season drops. An 8:30 tryout for The Cleveland Show once again proved it's not so different from the other second-tier cartoons when scheduled the same way.
- Info thus far on History's big night: the two-hour premiere of miniseries The Bible nearly pulled off Hatfields & McCoys numbers, scoring 13.1 million viewers and a 3.3 A18-49 rating. (Night one of Hatfields had 13.9m and a 3.7.) Leading out was the premiere of drama series Vikings, which was a lot weaker than its lead-in but also skewed noticeably younger: 6.2 million viewers and 2.5 million A18-49 viewers (which would translate to a 1.9 or 2.0 rating).
WHAT MATTERS:
- Like on Thursday, usual contender CBS continued to air repeats in the first week after February sweeps. Unlike on Thursday, some of the competition stepped up. ABC's sitcoms Last Man Standing and Malibu Country followed up series lows last week with double-digit growth to their best showings since early February and early January respectively. And Fox's Kitchen Nightmares also had one of its better showings.
- The only really bad news was had by the CW's Nikita, which was unable to bounce back from its own 8:00 low point last week.
While we were focusing on
Golden Boy last Tuesday, the night's surprise premiere success was actually ABC's
Celebrity Wife Swap, which scored a solid
2.4 demo at 8:00. That plus
Golden Boy's struggles make
Swap the more interesting week two to watch, especially now that it's been slated for the Thursday 8:00 slot later on. Maybe I'm overreacting, but with less appealing celebrities (sorry Coolio!) and a special
American Idol inhabiting the night for Fox, a week two drop to 2.0 or less seems quite possible.
Celebrity Wife Swap Over/Under: 1.95.
It's been an uneventful winter for Sunday broadcast series. But with NFL and awards seasons over, the broadcasters are back in force with a couple two-hour premieres tonight. ABC has new midseason drama
Red Widow leading out of
Once Upon a Time while NBC trots out another edition of
Celebrity Apprentice. Which two-hour premiere gets fired? That's
The Question for Sunday, March 3, 2013.
The spring premieres are much less structured than early fall or even early winter, so after much deliberation I decided to simply spread out the spring Best Case/Worst Case posts and keep all the coverage relatively close to the premiere dates. (Really, I'm just holding out hope that NBC moves Hannibal
.) So there will be one post today, one in mid-March and one at the beginning of April. Since spring has lots of repeats and less structure, I'm not doing the bigger picture "The Basics" stuff. Just keeping this to a look at the individual shows.
WHAT MATTERS:
- The competition was light on the first day after February sweeps, but the few remaining originals weren't really able to take advantage. Another two-hour American Idol and NBC's Community were only about even week-to-week (Community ticked up after finals), while the third episode of Zero Hour on ABC dropped again.
Wife Swap
Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC
Golden Boy
Fridays, 9/8c, CBS
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