Nearly 1.5 million viewers tuned in for the first episode of The Vampire Diaries Thursday night on CTV. Following Wednesday night’s 1.7+ mil Glee opener on Global, that makes two new fall hits out of the box.
Vampire sucked in 1,462,000 viewers in Canada according to BBM overnight PPM estimates. That placed the show third for the night nationally behind CSI (1,572,000) and Global’s Big Brother, with 1,789,000 viewers. Brother was also No. 1 in 18-49s with nearly a million fans in the demo.
The Vampire Diaries, featuring Toronto’s Nina Dobrev as bat bait (above with bat bro’ Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder), scored The CW its best series premiere ever, drawing 4.8 million U.S. viewers Thursday. While that bar is not set very high (only 2.3 million saw the start of Melrose Place on The CW this week, for example), at least the hit-starved network finally has a player in the game.
CTV’s gamble that Vampire Diaries would cash in on the teen neck biter trend seems to have paid off. After decades of importing dozens of U.S. shows at high prices each fall, the “broken business model” network made VD their only rookie U.S. fall entry.
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