Matt Lauer is not taking Today’s low ratings well – in fact, he has turned into an “anchor animal,” reports the Post.
Apparently, Mr. Lauer is trying to fix the show by “basically executive-producing,” berating staff for “not trying hard enough” and not letting anyone even mention Good Morning America. Today is Read More
It has been over a year since Oprah left her daytime perch and nobody has yet managed to fill that gaping void. However, Katie Couric, whose show, Katie, premiered last week, is already being crowned daytime Queen by her staffers. Read More
With its crushing lineup right now, HBO would be fools not to re-up on two of its most hype-producing shows: Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘ cringe-y comedy Veep (Curb Your Enthusiasm for the White House, with Buster bonus), and Lena Dunham‘s cringe-y (for totally different reasons) Apatow production, Girls.
Luckily, fools they are not, and both shows have been renewed for second seasons before we’ve had time to learn most of the characters’ names. Read More
Former Vice President Al Gore’s pet TV project, Current TV, is in the news for all the wrong reasons these days. Current, which Mr. Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt seek to turn into a rival to the likes of MSNBC, just fired firebrand Keith Olbermann for, well, being Keith Olbermann, and Mr. Olbermann will likely sue them for the pleasure. Now Reuters reports via “three sources with knowledge of the situation” that Current may not meet Time Warner Cable’s “minimum threshold” for average number of viewers per quarter: Read More
The Weinstein Company, which has had a complicated history with the Motion Picture Association of America in recent years, is threatening to leave the MPAA, a group that lobbies Washington and issues ratings. Harvey Weinstein’s company lost its appeal to knock the rating of forthcoming documentary Bully, about high-school brutality, from R to Read More
Last night’s Super Bowl was super exciting, what with Madonna and the very close game between the New England Patriots and the the New York Giants. And New Yorkers were not the only ones who thought so: last night’s game was the most-watched television event in TV history, beating out last year’s 111 million average by an extra 300,000 viewers. (We speculate that those extra viewers were people who hate football but love Madonna, and who turned off NBC the moment Downton Abbey started.)
A giant event like the Super Bowl breaking its own record is not that unusual. A little bit stranger is the fact that the night had a second huge win for NBC when the second season premiere of The Voice became the highest rated entertainment program since 2006. Read More
Last night’s Super Bowl received the third-best “overnight” ratings of all time, following only the games held in 1987 and 2011. It was good news for NBC all around, with a 47.8 rating for the game and a 19.4 rating for the lead-out program The Voice (that series’s best rating ever). The program increased in Read More
It’s a world full of rankings out there—weekend box office? Times best sellers? Oprah vs. Ellen? Wicked vs. Spider-Man? How does one make sense of what’s popular, and what it all means? We’re here to help with Number Theory. We’ll look at the week’s rankings to see who’s on top and whom they’re atop. Fortunes Read More
Last night, Conan O’Brien returned to late night TV for the first time since his acrimonious departure from NBC in January. The debut episode of his new TBS show, “Conan,” was a hit with higher ratings than Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” Dave Letterman’s “Late Show,” “The Daily Show,” and “The Colbert Report.” Read More
Though The New York Times would never put it quite so crassly, a piece in the Business section points out what many of us have long feared: Most TV viewers are dumb as dirt; Les Moonves is a genius; bad reviews don’t mean squat, sophistication is overrated, and evil is triumphant.
CBS, the Read More
