TV Jots

Ratings Not Royal At All

Sometimes you have to wonder if maybe NBC is cursed. On Sunday, March 15, the network presented the two-hour premiere of its so-called David and Goliath adaptation Kings. Yet, despite considerable positive critical buzz, decent advertising, and good word of mouth, it seems viewers couldn’t have cared less. The series closed the night with a paltry average of 6 million total viewers. Ouch!

The good news, if that’s an accurate description, is that Kings held steady among 18–49-year-olds, more or less maintaining a 1.6 rating (average percentage of U.S. households tuned into the show) and 4 share (average percentage of televisions in use that were tuned into the show) for that big-deal (at least to advertisers) demographic.

The bad news is that the overall ratings consistently bled over the course of the two-hour time slot, going from 6.47 million (8–8:30pm EST) to 6.33 million (8:30pm–9pm) to 5.71 million (9pm–9:30pm) to finally 5.49 million (9:30pm–10pm). That’s a loss of nearly one million viewers from start to finish.

How do we know this is a poor performance, even if we have no clue what adequate or great ratings are? Well, the top primetime show of the night was ABC’s Desperate Housewives (of course) at 9pm, which raked in 14.44 million total viewers and achieved a 5.0/12 for the 18–49 demographic. Even Fox’s least-watched animated series of the night, King of the Hill, managed a 2.4/6 with an overall audience of just 5.38 million viewers.

I still haven’t had a chance to check out the Kings two-parter “Goliath” — so I can’t offer any assessments about quality at the moment — but I can’t help feeling bad for the cast and crew that it didn’t perform better. With a star like Ian McShane, surely the show couldn’t have been that awful and deserved a warmer reception and higher numbers. I guess I’ll see soon enough when I watch the episode.