Since ER flatlined in 2009, NBC’s Thursday night lineup has been the Drunk Uncle of prime time television. But in a radical move to reclaim its movie-night mojo, the Peacock is planning a major overhaul of the three-hour block. Beginning this fall, the criminally underwatched Parks and Recreation will lead off NBC’s Thursday night roster, leading into three new sitcoms and the well-received drama, Parenthood. At 8:30 p.m., the Sony Pictures Television sitcom Welcome to the Family takes the spot vacated by the canceled Up All Night. Starring Mike O'Malley, Mary McCormack, Richardo Chavira and Ella Rae Peck, WTF is a culture-clash comedy about Anglo and Latino families who’ve been thrown together in the wake of an unanticipated pregnancy.
Read MoreNBC began passing on pilots Wednesday afternoon but numerous series on the bubble will have to wait another day to learn their fate. There was increasing chatter in the biz that NBC was preparing to do a house-cleaning of its comedy slate, with “Parks and Recreation” the only existing comedy sure of returning, probably for... Read more
Read MoreParting is such sweet sorrow, but NBC is taking the sting out of series finale of The Office by tacking an extra 15 minutes onto the one-hour running time. The Peacock announced today that Episode 200/201 of its long-running comedy will air from 9 to 10:15 p.m. on May 16. NBC will compensate for the 75-minute closer by running fewer commercials in lead-out drama Hannibal. Along with giving fans some bonus time with the Dunder-Mifflin gang, the super-sized episode allows NBC to sell another four to five minutes of commercial inventory. With expectations of a big turnout for next week’s show, NBC has commanded unit costs as high as $400,000 per 30-second spot. Per media buyer estimates, the premium marks a nearly 200 percent uptick from the average price NBC wrote for Season 9 during the 2012-13 upfront. While that makes for a tidy increase, the price of admission is nowhere near as steep as other recent finales. For example, ABC in 2010 secured a 325 percent markup for the final installment of Lost , commanding around $925,000 per :30. Then again, the Lost capper also averaged 13.5 million viewers and a 5.8 in the 18-49 demo, numbers well beyond what anyone expects for The Office finale. That same year, Fox secured an average unit cost of around $675,000 for time in the last installment of 24, more than double the rates it charged in the preceding upfront. As series finales go, the most expensive time buy in TV history was in the May 6, 2004, installment of NBC’s Friends. Clients ponied up as much as $2.25 million for 30 seconds of air time in “The Last One,” which would go on to draw a massive 52.5 million viewers. By Nielsen’s reckoning, approximately 43 percent of TV homes watched the episode.
Read MoreWith just six weeks to go before the 2012-13 broadcast season comes to a shuddering halt, one of the last remaining premieres has exploded on the launch pad. According to Nielsen fast-national ratings, the new NBC dating show Ready for Love started off fairly well before losing nearly half its audience by the time the night came to a close. At 9 p.m., leading out of The Voice , Ready for Love drew a not-inconsiderable 5.37 million viewers and a 2.1 in the 18-49 demo. From there, the wheels fell off. The demo in the second half hour plummeted 24 percent to a 1.6, before staggering to a 1.3 rating at 10 p.m. and a 1.2 in the final lap. All told, the final half hour dropped 43 percent from the 9-9:30 p.m. time slot; the same held true for the premiere’s 10:30-11 p.m
Read MorePres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves , in response to Aereo? Snap consensus judgement from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon. People I’ve talked to who work in TVland think that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments are just that — comments, not a plan. It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV .
Read MoreBroadcasters this week squeezed out two of the final scripted series premieres of the 2012-13 campaign, and as has been the case throughout the season, the results were unspectacular. ABC on Wednesday launched its penultimate freshman effort, bowing How to Live with Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life) after a new episode of Modern Family. Based on the title of a Fiona Apple record (ed. note: not really), the Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) sitcom drew 8.44 million viewers and an entirely respectable 2.9 in the 18-49 demo. How to Live with Your Parents now stands as the year’s third highest-rated new comedy premiere, trailing only NBC’s Go On (3.4, Sept. 11) and ABC’s just-wrapped The Neighbors (3.2, Sept. 26). While How, etc.’s opening deliveries were encouraging, its retention numbers were a bit soft. The premiere retained just 69 percent of its Modern Family lead-in; the Wednesday night warhorse drew a 4.2 in the dollar demo at 9 p.m. Things were decidedly less merry over at NBC. The Peacock last night introduced Hannibal , the latest in a long line of pretenders to the Thursday 10 p.m. throne. The cannibals n’ cops caper drew 4.36 million viewers and a 1.6 in the demo, and while that marked a tidy 78 percent improvement from the previous occupant—the first episode of the doomed Do No Harm delivered an anemic 0.9 rating on Jan. 31—Hannibal was down 20 percent from the 2.0 served up by the March 1 premiere of Awake
Read More
