Biggest Shock of the Day!

No, I'm not talking about seeing who lived and died on Heroes (or who got better), I'm talking about this press release from SciFi Channel.

The first part of the Tin Man miniseries set records for the SciFi Channel, beating out Taken and anything else that has ever aired on the channel. Whether they will also stick around for Parts 2 and 3 remain to be seen, but the fact that a record number of people actually tuned in to SciFi and watched it live is a very big surprise. Considering SciFi's regular shows have been struggling to get much abouve a 1.0 rating, drawing a 4.2 Household rating is pretty significant. It looks like if SciFi puts together something that catches peoples interest, they can still find the channel. Now if only they were running ads for a second season of Dresden Files instead of a second season of Destination Truth or Ghost Hunters International. They also promoted the second half of Stargate Atlantis' season as well as the eventual return of Battlestar Galactica while not airing any promotional ads for Flash Gordon. Maybe its just as well not that many people have been watching Flash Gordon otherwise when they saw Mings palace in Tin Man and recognized the same Vancouver forest that Flash spends a lot of time in, they might have tuned out.

Tonight, however, it is up against the Heroes mid-season finale (or season finale depending on the writers strike) as well as a special two hour episode of The Closer on TNT (which normally does ratings most broadcast networks would love to have). As it is, SciFi has a new record, which means they will take that as a go-ahead to remake more classics as series and miniseries. I'm not sure if I even want to contemplate what they might do next right now.

Back to figuring out my money picks on TV Big Shot ...

SFTV Network Ratings Update

The second week of the new season has come and gone and none of the new genre shows have been cancelled yet!

That doesn't mean that a few dropped off a bit in the second week and they better not keep sliding, though.

First up, NBC's SciFi Monday has some legs, although Journeyman's are getting a bit wobbly, in part due to losing a good chunk of the lead-in provided by Heroes. The first week's total ratings for Heroes were bumped up a bit due to a new Nielsen rule that allows a network to show the same episode twice in a week and add the ratings points together if all of the commercials are the same. Thus the second week of Heroes dropped quite a bit from the first week but in actuality was close to the same. Both Chuck and Journeyman dropped a bit over 10% from their first week, which isn't too bad compared to some of the other new shows in their second week.

On Tuesday, Reaper did OK, dropping about 15% from its debut, but not losing any of its Beauty and the Geek lead-in.

Wednesday saw a big drop by The Bionic Woman, about 18% in ratings and 27% in the adult 18-49 demographic. Wednesday also saw Pushing Daisies debut very strongly with an 8.3 overnight rating.

On Thursday, Smallville held fairly close to its season debut and Supernatural returned at about its season average.

Friday saw CBS's lineup hold fairly steady, with Ghost Whisperer, Moonlight, and Numb3rs dropping only slightly from their season debuts.

Thanks for The Futon Critic for the ratings info...

On the cable front, Stargate Atlantis returned to SciFi on Sept 28th and drew a 1.2 rating. Definitely better than Painkiller Jane or Flash Gordon had been doing. This past Friday, SciFi started airing the Battlestar Galactica Razor flashbacks during Flash Gordon, which in turn delayed the start of Stargate Atlantis. If you don't want to sit through Flash Gordon, SciFi is making them available online as well. Also, it appears that the Friday night before the Razor movie airs, SciFi will air all of them during the 9:00 pm to 10:30 pm time slot during an Enterprise marathon.

In other SciFi news, they announced that Ghost Hunters International will debut in January. It looks like between the original Ghost Hunters, the Ghost Hunters International, and the upcoming UFO Hunters, they'll be having something new each week year round.

As for my TV Big Shot Network(s), I've done fair the first week (didn't realize how significant the points were for a ratings gain, which really paid off for shows that debuted strong versus the network's average last year) but I hope to take advantage of the gains in budget I made selling sliding shows and buying rising shows to start to make progress. That's why there isn't much SFTV in SFTVPlus because most of the genre shows dropped in the second week. Yes, I have no clue about the image for my network, it keeps showing up even when I have replaced it with something else. There's still a few bugs to be worked out of the system.