Ratings Report: Turkey Time Erodes Viewership, “Beat the Chefs” is the Most Rotten Egg
The moral of this week’s syndicated ratings report: People are too busy eating turkey and spending time with family to devotedly watch TV. Ratings are in from the week of November 19, 2012, the week which included Thanksgiving here in the states. Of course, these numbers shouldn’t be taken too close to heart, since programming around these times of year are generally down. Wheel of Fortune lost 1.3 million viewers and almost a full ratings point over last week’s record high, coming in with just under 10 million viewers and a 6.3 household rating. Jeopardy! took a beating as well, losing eight-tenths of a ratings point and about 1.2 million viewers, with under 8.5 million viewers and a 5.5 household rating.
Even though its rise has been meteoric, Family Feud‘s fall is just as hard. Losing six-tenths of a point makes them fall to a 4.1 household rating, and losing nearly a million viewers means about a 6.1 million viewership average. Figures for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Let’s Ask America are not available at press time, however, sweeps data shows that America‘s viewership is trending upward in the markets in which it is available, a great sign for a season two.
We have GSN ratings as well for the past two weeks. The Newlywed Game, for the week of November 19, 2012, did okay in its Thanksgiving evening slot, averaging 280,000 viewers. As we noted last week, the return of Beat the Chefs to the GSN schedule only scored 196,000 viewers in the first show and fell to 143,000 viewers for the second episode. The next week, the week of November 26, 2012, saw the last two episodes of Chefs being finished off. In what could be construed as amusing or sad, depending on your vantage point, these primetime episodes barely cracked 100,000 viewers. They were the 10th and 14th least-watched shows on the whole network that week. If The Pyramid is “in limbo,” Chefs is a disaster. Most episodes of Baggage at 3:30 in the morning did better than that show. Newlywed Game had another good showing, averaging 337,000 viewers in new Thursday evening episodes.
The best news about this week’s ratings? They’re done! Everything should be at a more respectable level in next week’s report.
Sources :
TV by the Numbers
Broadcasting & Cable
Son of the Bronx
of course ratings went down for gameshow cause most americans don’t break the tradtion of watching football during thanksgiving. if rating are any indication most people were watching any football games at the time of thanksgiving. So nothing new here.
Not surprised at all that Chefs’ ratings were a disaster. People don’t want to watch a cooking program on a game show network. Perhaps GSN would have better luck selling off the airing rights of the series to Food Network.
I am actually interested to see if Improv’s ratings are just as bad, if not worse, than they were back in 2011.
if Improv’s ratings are that bad then they should sell to ABC and have it retooled to Who’s Line. lol
late night airings of Baggage then Beat the Chefs now that’s funny
yet not supriseing seeing Beat the Chefs is NOT a game show
With this news, I expect GSN to try even harder to get it over…it’s the show that won’t go away.
Can’t believe I never caught this.
Super amuzing to see the Beat the Chefs numbers for Monday, November 26th. The Thanksgiving marathon did beyond awful. Even DWTS did better.
Ever since, Karn/O’Hurley Feud has been down for the most part on Mondays. The presence of ‘Chefs’ has killed that night.
There are some series that GSN will look into for renewal, but don’t get it(Love Triangle, Lingo, 1 vs 100, The Pyramid). Then there are complete failures like this and Improv-a-Ganza and Instant Recall.