It goes without saying that vampire soap True Blood is this summer’s true winner, not just continuing in the reinvention of HBO’s brand identity, but giving the pay cable channel its first bona fide ratings hit since the days of The Sopranos. The third season launched with 5.1 million viewers in June, a 38 percent increase over the second season. But the real testament to the show’s overwhelming success is revealed when you look at the cumulative numbers across the week. Over seven days, an average of 13.2 million viewers sank their teeth into True Blood, a staggering number that puts the bloody drama on par with major broadcast network hits during the regular TV season. No survey of the summer television landscape can be complete without acknowledging the pervasiveness of this show, which has become a major part of the pop culture zeitgeist, landing cover stories on Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, and has won over critics and audience members alike.
Not surprisingly, USA is the No. 1 destination for summer television, thanks to a bounty of programming from Burn Notice, Psych, and Royal Pains to White Collar, and newbie Covert Affairs, a dramedy set in the high-stakes world of international espionage. While Royal Pains and Burn Notice were the top two scripted series on basic cable this summer among key demographic of adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, Covert Affairs—which stars Coyote Ugly’s Piper Perabo as CIA trainee Annie Walker—was close behind. The show is set to become the most watched new series of the year among the key demo (2.65 million) and total viewers (6.3 million). It’s beating TNT’s new crime offering Rizzoli & Isles by 88 percent in adults 18-34 and 16 percent in adults 18-49 and has already, just a few weeks after its launch, been renewed for a second season.
ABC Family’s guilty pleasure Pretty Little Liars quickly transformed into a ratings juggernaut for the cable network, which also saw fantastic ratings for its original comedy series Melissa & Joey. While the latter is a risqué throwback to 1990s sitcoms (and even stars two actors from the era, Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence), Pretty Little Liars—based on the book series of the same name by Sara Shepard—fuses together the sexy slyness of the CW’s Gossip Girl and an overarching murder mystery plot that feels like it was ripped straight out of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The series recounts the disappearance of a popular girl from a slumber party and begins, a year later, following her circle of friends who are haunted by messages from someone who knows secrets that only their dearly departed friend would know. The premiere episode landed the largest series launch among the network’s key demographic ever and netted 2.47 million overall viewers, marking a ratings high that topped the launch of The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Ratings continued to soar after that and with the record-breaking success of the first 10 episodes, 12 additional episodes were ordered for the freshman season, with production slated to begin this fall.
Andrew Eccles
The sophomore season of USA’s smart and stylish White Collar preserved the network’s track record of creating and maintaining massive ratings for its original programming. White Collar trounced broadcaster CBS in its 9 p.m. Tuesday night timeslot this summer among adults 18-49 (2.02 million) and adults 18-34 (2.12 million) and landed the title of the second highest rated scripted series on Tuesdays this summer with 5 million viewers overall. (The highest rated is lead-out Covert Affairs.) The second season of the series has further developed the unlikely partnership between ex-criminal Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer) and FBI white-collar division agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay). It has also explored the supporting characters and deepened the overarching mythology, which involves Neal’s dead girlfriend, an amber music box belonging to Catherine the Great, and a slew of shady government agents, thieves, and information brokers this season. Plus, the show, which has a vintage feel, boasts some of the very best men’s fashion on television, thanks to those well-tailored suits that the ex-con loves.
Eric Ogden
Mad Men continued to make gains in its fourth season, posting record ratings for its season opener, with 2.92 million tuning in to see the fallout from the divorce of Don (Jon Hamm) and Betty Draper (January Jones), the formation of new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and learn just what year the new season would be set in (1965, for the record.) Those numbers not only mark a 6 percent increase over the third season, but also set a new record for original series programming at AMC to date. (The ratings also showed a sizeable improvement over the third season’s finale numbers with an increase of 62 percent.) The fourth season itself has also proven especially versatile, mining the post-divorce life of Don Draper for both drama and humor, the latter of which has been particularly noteworthy this year as well. Despite high drama, Mad Men has always utilized humor to puncture the tension and this season’s use of the funny—in particular with Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) and Don’s new (but old) secretary Miss Blankenship (Randee Heller)—have made the show both hauntingly hilarious.
Who said cancer can’t be funny? Showtime scored its largest audience in eight years for an original series launch with the Laura Linney-led dark comedy The Big C. The Emmy-winning actress stars as Cathy, a woman who, after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, decides to start living and discovering her inner “weird” again. The recent premiere for the show, which aired after the season opener of Weeds, drew 1.2 million viewers. Created by Darlene Hunt, The Big C follows Linney as she finds a new way to life in the midst of death; she’s joined by Oliver Platt as Cathy’s immature husband, Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe ( Precious) as sarcastic student Andrea, John Benjamin Hickey as her homeless brother, and Reid Scott as her doctor. Look for guest stars galore this first season, with Cynthia Nixon ( Sex and the City), Idris Elba ( The Wire), Liam Neeson, and more already lined up to make appearances.
MTV’s trashtastic reality series Jersey Shore can add bona fide ratings machine to its lexicon of regular activities besides GTL. (For those not following, GTL is “gym, tan, laundry,” i.e., the quotidian behaviors for the show’s guys.) The second season found the cast leaving behind the cold Jersey beach at Seaside Heights and heading down south for some Miami heat—the new locale brought a record 5.5 million viewers to the show in August, which made it the top-rated telecast of 2010 among P12-34. While pint-sized Snooki seemed to be the breakout star of the first season, it is Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino who seems to be the frontrunner this season. Recent media reports reveal that he would earn more than $5 million this year from endorsement deals and news broke that he will be joining the cast of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. It’s no surprise that MTV has already locked up the cast—save instigator Angelina—for a third season. The six remaining cast members are scheduled to return next year while the merchandising machine continues to push on and the series continues to be rolled out to networks around the world.
No one anticipated quite the groundswell that would rise up around Canadian cop drama Rookie Blue, which premiered in the U.S. in June to a staggering 7.25 million viewers overall. The premiere became the highest rated summer launch for a scripted series on ABC in almost six years and though ratings have slipped slightly over the following weeks, the show has managed to attract a sensational 6.58 million viewers on average per week. (The show draws an average of 1.63 million viewers in its native country.) Starring Gregory Smith ( Everwood), Missy Peregrym ( Reaper), Enuka Okuma, Charlotte Sullivan, and Travis Milne, the show has already been renewed for a second season, which likely to air next summer on ABC and Global in Canada.
ABC Family’s teen drama Huge—based on a novel by Sasha Paley and adapted by Winnie Holzman ( My So-Called Life) and her daughter, Savannah Dooley—follows the adventures of seven teens attending Camp Victory, a weight-loss camp, where they each embark on a journey of self-discovery. The series premiere lured 2.53 million viewers overall to the show, which was the third highest-watched scripted cable series among women 18-34 for the month of July. Starring Nikki Blonsky ( Hairspray), Gina Torres ( Firefly), Raven Goodwin, Hayley Hasselhoff, Harvey Guillen, Ashley Holliday, and Ari Stidham, Huge seems to be a shoo-in for pick-up. With the success of Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime and the upcoming CBS comedy Mike & Molly, the series seems to be part of a trend on television shows embracing those struggling with weight issues, rather than using them as the punchline.
Andrew Eccles
Despite significant success with its reality programming, MTV has been itching to push into original scripted series, something that hasn’t had a home on the cable network in quite a long time. Their first offering, the raunchy teen comedy The Hard Times of RJ Berger, created by David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith, launched to the tune of 2.62 million viewers overall. The series, which stars Fame’s Paul Iacono, revolves around a 15-year-old loser who discovers popularity when the school discovers his, uh, sizable endowments. It emerged as MTV’s second highest series among men 12-34 behind Jersey Shore for the season and ended its premiere run with season-highs, including 1.3 million total viewers and a 1.35 among the key viewers in the 12-34 demographic. With the path forged for future original scripted programming (a remake of Teen Wolf is on tap), MTV has already renewed Hard Times for a second season to air next year.
TNT’s female crime drama Rizzoli & Isles—based on a series of novels by Tess Gerritsen—premiered with a record-breaking series opener, netting 7.55 million viewers. The first episode set a record in July as the highest-rated launch for an ad-supported cable show, and became the second-highest launch ever for a basic cable series, according to TNT. The series stars Angie Harmon ( Law & Order) as Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and Sasha Alexander ( NCIS) as medical examiner Maura Isles, but also features The Sopranos’ Lorraine Bracco as Jane’s overbearing mother. Despite the strictly professional partnership between the two characters, viewers and critics have remarked on an overt lesbian subtext within the series, something the show’s writers seem to have already played up by having Rizzoli go undercover at a lesbian bar in the episode entitled, “I Kissed a Girl.” TNT has already renewed the series for a second season, with 13 episodes on tap for next year.
While A&E hasn’t had the best track record with scripted programming, the cable network has finally made a dent in the summer ratings game with crime drama The Glades, which stars Aussie actor Matt Passmore and Kiele Sanchez, formerly of Lost. The series launched in July and became the network’s highest rated original drama series telecast ever, with 3.6 million viewers overall and a record 1.4 million viewers in the key demographic of adults 25-54 as well as 1.2 million in adults 18-49. Though A&E has yet to renew The Glades—which revolves around a disgraced cop from Chicago who relocates to the Florida Everglades, where crime seems to follow him—many believe a second season order will be announced soon.
The sixth edition of ABC’s reality franchise The Bachelorette (itself a spinoff of long-running ABC reality staple The Bachelor) was one of the few broadcast network success stories this summer season. The latest installment featured bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky, who had eliminated herself from contention in the fourteenth season of The Bachelor (with Jake Pavelka) for work-related reasons. The season finale topped the fifth season finale by 1.6 million viewers (11.6 million vs. 10 million), which was its highest-rated finale overall since 2004. The season itself was up by 1.5 million viewers and 14 percent in adults 18-49 versus a year ago. Plus, the series managed to outperform CBS by 5 million viewers and by 85 percent in adults 18-49, making this spinoff a summer ratings juggernaut.
While AMC was able to tout the series premiere of its conspiracy thriller drama Rubicon as being the network's most-watched original drama series premiere—with 2.5 million viewers overall—the buzz on the glacially slow series has been less than stellar. The behind-the-scenes drama, created by Jason Horwitch, has seemed more taut than the plot of this meandering series, revolving around intelligence analysts at the fictional American Policy Institute. Recent episodes haven’t fared nearly as well as the two-hour series opener (which had the added benefit of also repeating the pilot that had premiered with a sneak peek the month before). The Aug. 24 broadcast of Rubicon had only 1.14 million viewers tuning in, a sizable drop from those record-setting numbers. While the ratings could pick up—and new viewers could discover the series on DVD—the show doesn’t appear to be quite as much of a zeitgeist-grabber as fellow AMC dramas Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Based on Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid, Haven revolves around a small Maine fishing village that holds a host of secrets, including a connection to the back story of orphan-turned-FBI Agent Audrey Parker ( Brothers & Sisters’ Emily Rose) and a possible solution to the mystery of her parentage. The series premiere scored 2.336 million total viewers, marking a notable retention of 93 percent of lead-in Eureka’s audience. However, in recent weeks, that number has fallen to 1.89 million viewers. Critical reaction, however, has been mixed—the series has garnered a Metacritic score of 53 (on a 100 point scale), and the most scathing review came from USA Today’s Robert Bianco, who called Haven “a ludicrously see-through supernatural crime drama that wastes a perfectly fine performance from Emily Rose.” Ouch.
Eric Ogden
Despite a massive promotional push in May—when Fox offered a sneak peek of The Good Guys pilot episode similar to Glee’s early launch last year—the action-comedy failed to take off in its first outing, garnering just 4.98 million viewers. When the series officially premiered in June, the numbers for the Matt Nix-created show, which stars Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks, sank further to 4.65 million. Fox, which had already committed to 22 episodes of the show and gave it a slot on the fall schedule, opted to truncate the summer season, with the ninth episode sagging to 3.69 million viewers. Was the channel too quick to pick up additional episodes before the show had even premiered? (Very likely.) While Fox’s attempt to channel the USA brand for itself seems to have backfired (creator Nix had previously launched USA’s breakout hit Burn Notice), it’s still unclear how long they’ll allow ratings to further atrophy before they rethink this strategy.
It’s hard to figure out just what metrics to apply to reality competition series Bachelor Pad, a spin-off of ABC’s Bachelor/ The Bachelorette franchise, in which former contestants compete for a final cash prize of $250,000. While credit goes to ABC for realizing that most of these competitors aren’t after love but a cash payout, there’s also something even more inherently sleazy about the show, which seems to want to cash in on the massive ratings of CBS’ behemoth Big Brother. Of late, Bachelor Pad was slightly up over the week before (showing a 0.1 increase) but had only lured 5.95 million viewers, a sizable drop from The Bachelorette’s massive ratings earlier this summer.
Rick Rowell
A hit around the world, Fox’s Masterchef—a.k.a. the latest US series featuring enfant terrible chef Gordon Ramsay—hasn’t quite proved the smash hit that Fox’s top brass were likely hoping for this summer. While Fox is touting the culinary competition show, which features amateur home cooks rather than professional chefs, as the number one new series of the summer, the numbers don’t quite speak to their self-appointed title. Unlike Bravo’s Top Chef, which features slick production values, Masterchef hasn’t managed to grow into a gargantuan hit (it launched with 5.75 million and fluctuated only slightly) and hasn’t quite sparked with the public or with critics. As Geoff Berkshire said in Variety, “Even with Top Chef currently in the midst of one of its weaker seasons, there's no reason to sample what Masterchef is serving.” Check, please.
The CW has tried to program original series during the summer to limited success (remember Kevin Williamson’s Hidden Palms from a few years back?). They didn’t manage to crack the code this year either. The CW imported Canadian family comedy 18 to Life… and then canceled it three weeks later, replacing it with repeats of Life Unexpected. One can’t blame the CW; after all, a seriously anemic 825,000 viewers tuned in on average. The picture wasn’t much prettier for the CW’s makeover transformation show Plain Jane, hosted by Louise Roe, who some may recognize as Olivia Palermo’s amiable adversary on MTV’s The City. Plain Jane premiered with 0.98 million viewers, the least watched series premiere ever to air on the CW and lost viewers from its lead-in, a repeat of America’s Next Top Model. The ratings have improved but still linger way under the 1.5 million mark. No amount of lipstick can save this doomed series.
While the culinary competition series still scores well for Bravo, the once sterling series has taken quite a few dents this season from critics and viewers alike, who have accused the series of lackluster and obvious editing and poor casting this season. It’s especially felt as the previous season was so strong, both in terms of ratings and creative, and by the fact that Bravo has rolled out too many ancillary spin-off series in the same year (i.e. Top Chef Masters and the upcoming Top Chef: Just Desserts). Only 1.8 million tuned in to the premiere of this season (set in Washington D.C.), which was the lowest premiere rating since the series began in 2004. There’s still strength left in this addictive series, but this current season has seemingly left a sour taste in many people’s mouths.
Justin Stephens
NBC’s short-lived thriller Persons Unknown, from The Usual Suspects creator Christopher McQuarrie, seems like a bit of a holdover from an earlier era at the Peacock. It’s a low budget series with no real marquee names and was shot outside of the country. The premise—a group of strangers who are kidnapped and find themselves in a seemingly deserted town from which there is no escape—seems to borrow liberally from other sci-fi shows like Lost and The Prisoner. After airing on Mondays, NBC shifted the low-rated show to Saturdays… and then, in a bizarre twist, opted to pull the eleventh episode and only make it available online before airing the final two episodes as a two-hour block. However, a glance at the ratings make their decision to yank the show out of a weeknight slot less head-scratching: after launching with 4.29 million viewers, it sank as low as 1.26 million viewers in early August.
One has to admire ABC’s determination to launch original scripted series in the summertime, something that Fox had at one time been able to pull off magnificently in the days before cable’s domination in the warmer months. (Exhibit A: The O.C.) But one also wishes that the network had perhaps spent more time working out the kinks in their two dead-on-arrival series this summer, supernatural soap The Gates (about a gated community that houses vampires, werewolves, and witches), and dramedy Scoundrels, about a family of criminals. (The latter, based on Kiwi series Outrageous Fortune, already had one botched adaptation at the network under its belt.) Despite a seemingly insatiable public appetite for vampires, The Gates averaged only 3.20 million viewers this summer, while Scoundrels dropped from 5.17 million for its launch to 2.84 million over the course of eight episodes.
Bob D'Amico
Given the relative success of Canadian cop drama Flashpoint for CBS, it made sense for the network to try to repeat the formula with Canadian-produced police drama The Bridge. They would have been wrong: The Bridge, which starred Battlestar Galactica’s Aaron Douglas, premiered to just 2.98 million viewers. After airing the third episode—which captured just 2.88 viewers—CBS axed the show.
It’s a bit of a puzzle to figure out which executive at ABC thought it would be funny or entertaining in our current economic climate to see prizes destroyed or flung off of a seven-story building. But that’s exactly what Downfall offers. It was the shocking awfulness of everything—host Chris Jericho, woefully cast here, the trivia questions, and the premise itself—that likely led to the plummeting ratings. The show, savaged by critics, premiered with 5.86 million viewers, which, over the course of the five episodes that aired this summer, has fallen all the way to 3.37 million viewers. Obnoxious and insipid, Downfall proved that as bad as reality programming gets, there’s always a way to sink lower.
Craig Sjodin
