Will Pushing Daisies soon be pushing daisies?
This whole Do-Over things isn’t going that well for last September’s rookies. While audiences on both sides of the border are flocking back for old favorites like CSI Miami, Grey’s Anatomy, House and Desperate Housewives, it is a different story for shows launched last fall. Many promising Fall 2007 series, such as Pushing Daisies, Life and Chuck, and others that started strong, like Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money, have stumbled into second seasons. These were the shows hardest hit by the writers strike, with what little momentum they could muster crushed by up to nine months of inactivity. Absence doesn’t seem to have made viewers fonder for these shows.
Cases in point. the second season premiere of Pushing Daisies–a show generally embraced by critics–was down 53% year-to-year in the demo. That’s according to the man who should know, Mediaweek’s Programming Insider Marc Berman, who calls Daisies–gulp–“the Arrested Development of dramas.” In the TV business, there is no great curse or compliment.
The fantasy/drama could only muster a fourth place 6.32 million viewers in the U.S. on ABC Wednesday, down a ton from the 13.03 who checked it out last Oct. 3.
It gets worse; as Berman points out, the show lost a fat chunk of viewers in its last half hour last night.
Private Practice, the Grey’s Anatomy spin off, was also way down, drawing 8.05 million viewers at 9 p.m. on ABC. Last year it opened with 14.41 million viewers.
Other second year shows in trouble: Life (7.40 million), Dirty Sexy Money (7.14 million), Chuck (6.48 million), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (5.40 million), Lipstick Jungle (5.31 million).
CTV must have seen this coming. They quietly slipped Daisies, Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money over to A this season.
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