Ratings Report: “Fifth Grader” Continues to Shine

Time for another ratings update, which you can get more coverage of by clicking here.  The headliner this week is surely Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, which was recently renewed for a second season.  The show went up 6% to a nice 1.8 rating.  One thing to note with this is that this isn’t solely the syndication rating.  This is factoring in other things, like the MyNetwork airing (which became a programming syndicator this season).  When the show first came out the original episodes in syndication-only got around a 1.0 or less.  But the show’s success has been because of a fantastic marketing plan by Twentieth.  I originally scoffed and said airing the show on MyNetwork and CMT would be overkill, but it’s brought in a lot of money and kept the show around.  Not to mention it is genuinely a fun format.  If they can keep up this momentum and actually build anticipation for a second season, which Deal or No Deal chose not to do, this show may run for some time to come.

Let’s look at ratings from one year ago (week ending February 1st), and we’ll do that for the rest of the post.  We’ll start with the canceled Deal or No Deal which chose just to speed to the grave this season for some reason. Deal or No Deal was at a 2.0 then, so that’s a loss of 35% from a year ago.  It did the worst of the game shows from the year-ago vantage point.  I’d argue it’s an age thing, but the reruns on cable do well so it can’t be the main factor.  It probably doesn’t help that you can’t tell a rerun from years ago to a new episode.  Again, it’s part of the whole “speeding to the grave” thing.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire saw a season low 2.4 rating, but believe it or not we’re up to a 2.7.  It’s been in this general range the entire time.  I’ll have to check more but I think the show may be up from a year ago, all averaged together.  It’s the only show to be either level or up from last year regularly.  The show went through a massive transformation the past year, and as much as I love the show it frankly got pretty cheap with the prizes given away in recent times, but people are still flocking to it.  As a huge fan of the show that’s a big relief.  The “You’re In the Hot Seat” home game seems to be bringing some extra eyes in.  Look out in the next few weeks for “Real Housewives of Millionaire” week which will apparently have some tie-in with the Bravo reality series.  In March will be Million Dollar Movie week, and that week tends to give away the most money out of any season.  Last season there were three $250,000 winners right in that area, so don’t miss it if you miss seeing the six figure sums thrown around.

Family Feud last year at this time was at a 1.5, and this season it’s at a 1.4.  Only a loss of around 6% or so, which in the grand scheme of things is fine.  There’s always a core group of fans who get terrified when shows make changes from their holy/sainted original formats, but Feud needed it when they brought back Bullseye and a new car for winning five games.  The fans accepted it clearly, it has to be saving a bit of money overall, and the ratings haven’t been suffering this season at all really.  It’s been in that 1.5 area most of the time.  We’ll see what happens once established host John O’Hurley leaves and is replaced by Steve Harvey.  If nothing else I’m guessing Steve works for cheaper than John, and I do think Steve will do fantastic so the cheaper they can make it the longer we’ll see it stick around.

Finally, the two reliable shows.  Wheel of Fortune is down a bit, just 5%, from an 8.0 last year to a 7.6 this past week.  Jeopardy! was only down 3%, from last year’s 6.6 to last week’s 6.4.  The longevity and stability of these two shows is amazing.

Just a small site update.  You know the Contestant and Ratings pages which were never updated for some reason and horrendously broken.  Fixed them finally!  We’ll be making more tweaks to them as time goes on but they actually lead to new content which is updated regularly, that’s readable, and stuff that you can actually use.  Sorry for the delays in those.  I think after five years I’m starting to understand how to run this website