TV Jots

Should Fans Start Worrying?

This is the curse of following a hot, hot, hot TV series like American Idol, especially when you’re an untested, unproven show. After its Tuesday-night premiere, I intentionally refrained from writing about the excellent ratings Fox’s rookie supernatural cop drama New Amsterdam earned.

I wanted to see what would happen when it aired a second episode two days later on Thursday, opposite ABC’s phenomenal Lost (honestly — why aren’t more people watching this season?), CBS’ perennial fan favorite CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and NBC’s relatively popular Celebrity Apprentice. Just as I suspected, the Fox show came out on the losing end in more than one way.

According to overnight results from Nielsen Media Research, not only did the series attract fewer overall viewers than Lost (10.55 million for the Fox show versus 12.9 million for ABC’s), but more significantly, its audience substantially decreased from the first half-hour to the second while Lost‘s actually grew.

The drop was so steep — watchers tuned out to the tune of 2.9 million — that by the end of the hour, Celebrity Apprentice, which started with fewer viewers (8.4 million to New Amsterdam‘s 12 million), had gained more (9.3 million as opposed to New Amsterdam‘s 9.1 million). The CBS repeat of CSI lost viewers in the last half-hour, as well. But it too wound up with more than New Amsterdam in the final thirty minutes, matching Celebrity Apprentice at 9.3 million.

To be fair, New Amsterdam also experienced a similar two-plus-million drop-off from the first to second half-hour during the Tuesday debut. It started the hour with 14.94 million newcomers and ended it with 12.37 million, a difference of 2.57 million. Yet notably, almost all of the final number of people, 12 million, showed up again on Thursday for the beginning of the show.

I guess I’m one of the guilty parties responsible for the night-to-night decline as I recorded New Amsterdam to watch this weekend in favor of catching Lost in real time. While I enjoyed what I saw on Tuesday’s pilot — I reserve special praise for Danish star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and his English costar Zuleikha Robinson for putting in such good performances as Americans — the premise and execution of the show currently seem a bit too plain for my tastes in fantasy. I’m all about the high drama and “Wow!!!” effects.

If you’re going to have a 400-year-old, cursed, immortal cop in New York City, you’d better make him extraordinary. At least give him a superpower or something to help him fight crime, in addition to his impressive yet humdrum gigantic memory. As long as the series only strives for mediocrity, I’m afraid the audience will have no choice but to continue disappearing. There’s too much good stuff elsewhere on television for the outcome to be otherwise.

Thank goodness, then, that Thursday was a special night and Mondays from 9pm–10pm are New Amsterdam‘s regular time slot. That should help … until ABC resumes its formidable two-hour Dancing with the Stars installments again on March 24th.