The Climate, Week Nine: Holiday Ratings Resiliency

Today in The Climate, a few observations about the ratings downturns during Thanksgiving week.

Spotted Ratings, Thursday 11/29/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• The week of broadcast upswing pretty much came to an end, mostly just because this was the first night that wasn't being compared against holiday-deflated results. Compared to two weeks ago, it was generally ABC, CBS and NBC a little down and Fox and the CW a little up.

• A few noticeable exceptions: 
• Scandal finished with an outright season high despite a rather meh result from lead-in Grey's Anatomy.
• Two and a Half Men dropped in finals but still took the smallest percentage drop of the CBS shows despite Angus T. Jones urging viewers not to watch.
• Parks and Recreation and Last Resort had the night's most terrible results, each going two tenths below their previous season lows.

Spotted Ratings, Wednesday 11/28/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• The strong season for holiday specials continues. ABC's A Charlie Brown Christmas and NBC's Christmas at Rockefeller Center were slightly up year-to-year, while NBC's two-hour Saturday Night Live Christmas special was up even more vs. last year's SNL special A Very Gilly Christmas (2.1). All those shows were huge improvements over the normal timeslot programming.

• Everything else was original, and most shows were pretty much in line with the last "normal" Wednesday two weeks ago. CSI followed up its pretty strong Thanksgiving Eve showing last week by tying a season high this week and holding about 90% of the Criminal Minds demo.

Spotted Ratings, Tuesday 11/27/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• The broadcast upswing continued into another day. The only network with atypical listings was ABC, where holiday specials How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Shrek the Halls were just about even with year-ago levels. The finale of Dancing with the Stars, finally given a chance to air fully apart from The Voice, managed to easily outrate all other points this season. Sure, it was still way down year-to-year (vs. last fall's 4.1), but that's been the case all season, and usually to a larger extent. So a generally miserable season for the franchise at least ends on a less miserable note.

•  CBS saw the mothership NCIS take a big surge, but that upswing didn't really continue into NCIS: Los Angeles and Vegas, which had to face DWTS this time (when it's usually the mothership doing so). This is another piece of evidence that DWTS has an incredible amount of crossover with CBS programming; see also CBS' big surge in the Dancing-free 9:00 hour last Monday.

• Regularly-scheduled Fox and NBC on average upswung somewhere in the mid-teens vs. last week.

Spotted Ratings, Monday 11/26/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• Everybody gets a prize! Almost every show was up double-digits week-to-week. CBS can thank the 8:30 repeat of The Big Bang Theory for boosting 2 Broke Girls, Mike and Molly and Hawaii Five-0 to season highs. Revolution heads into its nearly summer-length hiatus with an uptick and Dancing with the Stars hit an outright season high too.

• The only real loser was the short-order return of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, down 40%+ vs. last week in both hours. So that's why they cancelled it! ESPN also laid a relative egg with a dud Monday Night Football (4.0). Those results probably contributed to the magnitude of the increases elsewhere.

The True Top 25, Week Ending 11/25/12 (2012-13 Week Nine)

Football dominated the True Top 25 in a holiday week. Though the Patriots/Jets Thanksgiving primetime game was actually four tenths weaker than the Giants/Packers Sunday game in raw numbers, it graded out much better Truly speaking because the 18-49 TV usage was nearly ten percentage points weaker on Thursday than on Sunday. And ABC's college game, the best since the network picked up regular primetime football in 2006, was an extremely strong #3.

The holiday meant pre-emptions for the two top entertainment programs, so The Voice was left on top of that pack even with (by its standards) a really horribly-rated week.

Spotted Ratings, Sunday 11/25/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• ABC's Once Upon a Time had a bounce-back from its head-scratching drop two weeks ago, but it was still near the low end of its pre-last week results. But ABC had another problem result as this time it was Revenge coming back after the week-ago pre-emption at well below its previous results this season.

• With the late afternoon NFL game on Fox, its animation was at relatively normal post-overrun numbers. The Cleveland Show had a fairly American Dad!-esque tryout at 9:30. CBS was at pretty typical start-on-time levels with The Mentalist way up from last week when it started super-late.

Spotted Ratings, Saturday 11/24/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• ABC is greatly disadvantaged in the overall averages every year due to sports, so it's nice to see them finally have a big day in that realm. Notre Dame's victory over USC was the highest-rated Saturday Night Football of not just this season but any season since ABC picked it up in 2006. A game this big lifts ABC as a whole by several ticks for the week. Fox's Stanford/UCLA got left wayyy behind.

• CBS commenced its Made in Jersey burn-off, but I have to think it's no guarantee they will even air all the episodes if it continues to drag down the rest of the night like this. The night as a whole was down more than 40% week-to-week, but ABC's strength could also have something to do with that.

Spotted Ratings, Friday 11/23/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• The Thanksgiving downturn in overall viewing always behaves about the same way: a small downturn on Monday and Tuesday (though it seemed to have a larger impact on broadcast ratings this year), a significant downturn on Wednesday, a huge one on Thursday, and then... poof. Order is almost completely restored on Black Friday. That meant the few entertainment programs on the evening, Last Man Standing and Malibu Country and 20/20, were basically unaffected.

• Returnee holiday specials on CBS were even to up year-to-year, but the network got little mileage out of its originals. It's a SpongeBob Christmas! didn't move the needle and the return of Person to Person was way down from the last special CBS tried late last season.

Spotted Ratings, Thursday 11/22/12

WHAT MATTERS:

• Thanksgiving Night is the depth of this week's holiday viewing downturn, but NBC provided a nice boost to the broadcast evening thanks to their newly negotiated Thanksgiving football game. The Thanksgiving game was on the NFL Network last season. It had ratings comparable to recent SNF results despite airing on a much, much lower-viewed night.

• Fox aired its normal Thursday lineup, probably in large part because they had the benefit of an NFL overrun in the late afternoon. That overrun was evident in The X Factor's numbers but clearly out of the mix by the time Glee got going; it was a whooping 29% behind last week's already bad number. I'll include the NFL overrun, if available, as a lead-in in the final True2 number for The X Factor.