Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Cancellation Watch: It Will Take More Than a Tiny Cult to Keep The CW's Cult Alive


CW mid-season entry Cult aired its second episode last night, pulling the same abysmally low numbers as the show's premiere last week.  It could only muster up a 0.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic with less than nine hundred thousand total viewers (based on the preliminaries).  That's lower than Syfy's Being Human (which pulled a 0.4 rating on Monday) and lower than the Canadian imports Lost Girl and Continuum that cable network airs.  Heck, that's probably lower than some repeats of Dora, The Explorer that aired on Tuesday.  The good news for Cult is that its numbers didn't drop with its second epsiode, but then it can't really fall too much lower (without going into negative numbers).  I discussed the prospects of Cult and the two other mid-season underperformers (Zero Hour and Touch) in my Monday column, and as I mentioned there Cult has the best chance of the three because it airs on fifth place network CW.  And in fact, that network has announced the finale date for the show (May 14th), so it looks like they plan on airing out all the show's episodes despite its low ratings, which is more than either Zero Hour or Touch can hope for.  But at this point, it seems very unlikely that Cult will continue beyond the current season.

FOX's The Following slipping a tick in the ratings on Monday as it posted a 2.8 rating in the 18-49 demo and 8.6 million total viewers.  But that's really nothing to worry about as this show halted the slide it was experiencing for a few weeks and is now back in very safe territory.  In fact, it is currently FOX's highest rated scripted show based on season averages, so its future (if not subject matter) looks pretty bright at this point.

ABC's Once Upon A Time was preempted on Sunday for the Oscars, so check back next week to see if it makes any progress towards pulling itself out of its current ratings slump.  Keep an eye on the Cancellation Watch Twitter Site for the early returns from the rest of this week's shows and you can see the Cancellation Alert status of all the shows currently airing plus the final results from prior seasons at my Cancellation Watch page.  And for questions on how the ratings work and my Cancellation Alert statuses, you can see the Cancellation Watch FAQ.

Ratings Source: TV by the Numbers

Nielsen TV Ratings: ©2013 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.



Amazon Prime: Get Free 2-Day Shipping, Instant Access to Thousands of Kindle Books, and Free Streaming of Recent Sci Fi TV Shows Like These:
 

No comments:

Post a Comment