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| The cast gets the NBC numbers for Thursday night’s Saving Hope |
Well placed on a quiet, non-hockey night, Saving Hope opened big on CTV in Canada, drawing an overnight, estimated 1.52 million viewers.
Given that the U.S. has 10 times the population, the Toronto-lensed hospital drama should have pulled 15 million NBC viewers Thursday night. Summer ratings have been soft there, however, and NBC is in a much weaker competitive and promotional position than CTV, so cut expectations in half.
Cut them in half again.
Saving Hope opened to 3.1 million viewers Thursday night on NBC, well behind a repeat of Person of Interest on CBS and The Choice on Fox.
What does this mean for Canada’s latest co-pro? Hope hit close to a historic low for a scripted series premiere on NBC, but summer broadcast audience levels this week have been almost shockingly low across the board in the U.S. The highest-rated U.S. network show of the entire night, at 8.1 million viewers, was a repeat of The Big Bang Theory on CBS. The horrible new Fox dating game show, Take Me Out, opened to just 3.3 million viewers. ABC’s Rookie Blue drew 5.4 million at 10 p.m. Stateside.
CTV rushed out a release boasting that Saving Hope is the No. 1 Canadian made series premiere of the 2011-’12 season. Trouble is, last year that distinction was claimed by Combat Hospital, and we all know what happened to that shot-in-Toronto medical drama.
2 Comments
Out of curiosity, do you know what the Canadian ratings were for the premier of ‘The Firm’? I think ‘Saving Hope’ has the same Canadian production team(?)
Judy, the two-hour premiere of The Firm had 1.075 million viewers in Canada and 6.32 million in the US. That was a decent in Canada and a failure in the US, as it wasn’t summer. The 18-49 demographic, which is very important in the US, was also quite unacceptably low.
Saving Hope is an E1/Bell/ICFF show.
The Firm is an E1/Shaw/Sony/Paramount/Reiter show.
Rookie Blue is an E1/Shaw/Thump-ICFF show.
Ilana C Frank founded Thump Inc. in 1998. Ilana C Frank Films Inc. was started a year ago, after season 2 of Rookie Blue was completed. Thump Inc., which produced the first two seasons of Rookie Blue, was sold to E1 last year. So, there is a lot of overlap in the production teams for the three shows but each has unique components.