With nearly all the players now on the field, here's how Tuesday's numbers panned out:8 pm/ET NCIS returned to 17.7 million total viewers, a 30 percent increase from its previous premiere and the military drama's most-watched season opener ever. House placed second with 12.2 million (down 16 percent week-to-week), but topped the demos. Biggest Loser (7.18 million) lost 615 thou, followed by the debut of ABC's Opportunity Knocks (6.6 million). The CW's 90210 dipped 11 percent, to just under 3 million. 9 pm Dancing with the Stars dominated, averaging 18.2 million over its two-hour run. Coming in an impressive second, though, was CBS' The Mentalist, which debuted to 15.55 million. Fringe was No. 2 in demos for the hour, but dropped 27 percent of its Week 2 audience. Privileged slipped 568K, to 1.86 million. A shame.10 pm Trailing DWTS' second hour, Without a Trace opened its season with 11.38 million viewers, a 31 percent drop from last year (when it premiered on a Thursday). SVU (9.5 ...
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If you get deja view looking at ABC’s not-so-new fall lineup, there’s a reason for that. Much of the schedule is a redo from last fall, with a number of promising shows returning that were cut short by the writers’ strike—most notably the Wednesday lineup of Pushing Daisies, Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money.“Our Wednesday night was to us an unbelievable success and we’re very excited to get back to that,” ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson said during a session with critics at the TCA press tour Wednesday morning. “We have kind of the advantage going in that we felt we had a dominant fall and a real strong core schedule and we didn’t need that much new programming.”In recent seasons, ABC has tended to single out just a few new shows for massive fall promotion, and this season it's planning to embrace a few old favorites. “We can actually prioritize returning shows,” says McPherson. One in particular: Desperate...
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