Somehow, the eminently DVR-able results episodes of American Idol–in which 59 minutes and 55 seconds of filler led up to the news that someone would be sent home in a cloud of tears and Carrie Underwood–ended the 2008-09 TV season as the most-watched show, averaging 26.69 viewers over the course of the season and edging out its Tuesday-night companion by some 570,000 people. Either enough people watched the finale to push the Wednesday-night editions of the show ahead of the relatively action-packed performance episodes, or the continued success of Two And A Half Men is a leading indicator as far as how much crap your average people-metered viewer is willing to sit through when there’s nothing else to do at home. (Or maybe people just are really that sick of music.) The top 10, after the jump.
Rank) Program, Network (Total Viewers in Millions)
1) American Idol (Wednesday), Fox (26.69)
2) American Idol (Tuesday), Fox, (26.12)
3) Dancing With the Stars, ABC (20.32)
4) CSI, CBS (19.03)
5) NCIS, CBS (17.84)
6) The Mentalist, CBS (17.45)
7) Dancing With the Stars (Results), ABC (16.76)
8) Sunday Night Football, NBC (16.27)
9) Desperate Housewives, ABC (15.66)
10) Two and a Half Men, CBS (14.98)
Oh hey, Dancing With The Stars had a lot of viewers too! So people like music, at least when it’s beamed into their homes and they can consume it passively.
[TV Week; HT Vulture]
I don’t think it’s fair to say people are sick of music, just that the performances on AI don’t appeal to them, while the manufactured drama of the results show can be entertaining. As a general rule even the talented singers end up stuck with awful arrangements of good songs, good arrangements of awful songs, or Kara DiGuardio’s stuff which fuck the what that even is.
The performance show was kind of boring compared to the results show.
And… one of those had not one, but TWO performances of “No Boundaries”.
Well yeah, you get the AI audience plus the Ga Ga, Kanye, Katie Perry or whoever audience.
The results shows will always be a chore to sit through, and they could chop the thing to half an hour and still have a performance or two, but it’s all about the ad revenue apparently.
I’m shocked that the results shows did so well this season, but maybe people were curious to see some of the performers (the current ones; ahem, Natalie Cole). So… hour long results shows aren’t going away anytime soon, then. My suggestion for next season would be to use some of that time to focus on the contestants themselves, since Simon is always bitching about how they “show no personality.”
Hasn’t American Idol, though, taken over for old shows like American Bandstand and such as a prime vehicle for most of America to get exposed to Pop Hits? Your dad will never flip to MTV (too many awful rappers, amirite???), but he’ll sure as shit sit for AI and find out who this “Khanyay West” is. And parents LOVE Carrie Underwood.
I know the music blogosphere believes the rest of the world is in their 20s, is as obsessed with Grizzly Bear (the fuck is a grizzly bear) as they are, and has the Neuromancer chip behind the ear that’s just an RSS reader going directly into the spine, but there’s a reason Gokey, with his miserable adult-contemporary song choices, lasted as long as he did.