Holy Lord, the season has just ended and already nobody’s watching TV anymore.
Makes sense in Toronto where the weather is B-E-You-tiful. But gad, that no hockey for a whole week in May thing just ain’t working for CBC.
Last night’s numbers speak for themselves: an oddly-placed, Wednesday night rerun of This Hour Has 22 Minutes drew 131,000. Overused Just Four Laughs Gags did 120,000. A movie rerun of Bookie Finds Her Knickers or whatever drew 158,000, with 41,000 in the demo. Across Canada. Expiring parking meters have drawn bigger crowds!
How are people going to discover the fabulousness of season two of Triple Sensation without any eyeballs on those promo teasers?
Why doesn’t CBC move Jeopardy back to 7:30 during these long stretches between playoff games? Stuck at 4 p.m., the quiz show was down to 207,000 viewers, a fifth of its usual total. What is really dumb scheduling, Alex? Correy Street is also at a dead end at 3:30 with 283,000 viewers.
To be fair, the show that was sucking viewers from every corner of Canada was the finale of American Idol, but even that was down from last year. CTV says their “total” score on the Idol finale was 2.62 million. The BBM overnight, estimated “commercial” tally clocked in at 2,622,000. (A 40,000 jump between the two numbers seems about right.)
Fox did 28.8 million in overnight estimates with Idol, ranking it as their poorest finale score since 2004. Last year’s U.S. total topped 32 million.
Opposite Idol, Global’s James Bond movie, Casino Royal, did 715,000. While that’s not bad considering it has been on TMN at least 007 times in the past six months, it isn’t going to pay back too many loans.
Even TSN is offside without hockey on its bench. Last night’s NBA playoff game drew 185,000.
It was just as bad Monday and Tuesday without hockey on CBC with reruns of the Winnipeg Comedy Fest (147,000) and Sophie (92,000) playing basically to friends and relatives.
CBC won’t have another playoff game until tomorrow night, when Detroit faces off against Chicago for Game Three of the Third round.
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