You know what? I might be getting my weeks confused here..lol

No, "Bride" was not preempted in NY. "Abyss" was.

On the bright side Bride marks the first season 8 episode that had more viewers head to head with it's season 7 counterpart. By all rights Abyss should have taken the honor (Gemini only had 3.7 million viewers -- stupid Thursday night FB). Of course both Gemini and Persona were buried between long hiatuses so it wasn't really a fair fight.

Siren was the only episode on the back half of season seven to break the 4 million mark -- and it only did so by the hair of its teeth. It will be interesting to see how this season holds up come January especially with Lana in and Lois out for four episodes. Whether ratings go up or down It'll make for some interesting argu... er, discussions I'm sure.

Taken from Kryptonsite:



So why this happened: Chloe centered episode, Doomsday smashing or Noisers wanting to see CNois kiss?

Doomsday for sure. They've been pimping his arrival since last May and they had brief glimpses of him in the trailers. They didn't have this burst in downloads for Crimson or Hydro which actually had make out sessions and Clois touching lips. The Doomsday push has been so strong this season and building off of Brainiac's final lines in Abyss it seems pretty obvious, IMHO, that the download fetish was for Doomsday.

Smallville wasn't available for download back when Crimson and Hydro aired. It's only as recently as Odyssey, and even then, Bride lands pretty low when compared to other eps. this season that have landed at the #4 most downloaded spot.

I tired googling to find a rankings list but no luck. Which episode hit number 4?

I think it might have been Identity, but I'm not sure about that.

I think it was "Identity" too. Whichever episode it was, the episode from the week before was still on the top ten (#8 or 9?) when the new ep. hit #4. I remember looking at the list and being impressed.

Does anyone know when/if another hiatus will occur in spring? If they air 11-22 back to back, they'll run out on April 2, so there's bound to be one. They wouldn't go on hiatus during February sweeps, so probably 11-17 air back to back, then 6 weeks in March-April, to return April 16-May 14? This is my guess.

February sweeps are in March this year to accommodate for the analog-to-digital switch sometime in February. Which is kind of ridiculous - sweeps in the same month as March Madness? But, eh.

Aided I'm sure by all the other networks broadcasting the presidential address Smallville managed a pretty decent return ratings wise.


http://pifeedback.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6...451/m/489107381

Naner naner to the ratings :)


The break down is Lana eps until Feb Fifth. Then Infamous comes back to start off March Sweeps and it goes through to episode 18. 19-22 are aired in late April/May.

Airing against March Madness is so lame. My CW airs ACC play off games so I'm getting pre-empted. I wonder who else will too?

Mediaweek



It's weird. He usually has not so kind words for SV and then the week it free falls 10% he's saying it's "perked up." Though perhaps he's looking at episode to episode ratings from last year -- Bulletproof is the third episode in a row to beat its season seven counterpart in total viewers.

Given SV's tradition of shedding viewers as the season wears on Legion may be the last time they break 4 million viewers. Ever. IMO that's really a shame with AM's directorial debut airing next week. The description for Power sounds pretty horrendous but I'm never the less hoping viewership bounces back up since AM directed.

It's about a what? 400,000 viewer loss from 3.8 to 4.27 million? That's pretty good considering Bones moved and was new. Next week, I believe SV gets a break because Bones is a rerun/preempted for AI crap. I feel bad for AM as well. Apocalypse had a bit of a jump though and I wonder if that's cause TW directed or Marsters guest starred or people got tingly over presidential Lex. I have to admit. An episode with a preview that looks like it literally IS Chun-Li with Lana getting powerful is really, really, really gonna turn off viewers though.

Poor AM.

My bad. Now in the right thread!

Predictable. Lois is absent and the ratings take a dive.

Note the ratings for last week, when EDLo was also absent (emphasis added):



It would appear the lack of EDLo isn't the problem. I suspect it's the presence of Lana and the generally horrible promos and plotlines they've built around her.

Also, the scheme changed. Last week George Bush was on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX during the eight o'clock hour. This week it's new shows on all competing networks and the successful Bones has moved time slots to compete against SV instead of Kitchen Nightmares. Also, no comics book grabbing Legion.

No Lois is a poor excuse, IMHO, especially when the promo for this week misled casual viewers into thinking she was in the episode. As far as they knew/cared, they were getting Cloisana and didn't bite on it.

I think we also have to take into account that there likely would have been a good many people tuning in last week who don't normally watch the show. The same thing happened with Justice, if I recall correctly.

Exactly. Justice, Kara, Aqua, Odyssey, Legion...when there are big superhero pimping involved ratings tend to go up. That factors into the ratings and shows that bringing in other heroes more than Lana or Lois is a ratings booster, IMHO.

Prototype, with Lois as the lead plot and the Martyred Drunken Hook-Up of Motivation, was the lowest rated episode episode of Smallville ever, IIRC. Agreed.

With Bones on Fox and new-run episodes on the other networks, I think the traditional Spring drop is going to hit Smallville hard this year.

Bulletproof is ranked #4 in the demographics that matter for Ms. Ostroff (18-34). That's even better than Legion, so I fail to see how those ratings can even remotely be seen as bad.

Oh, and to stay on topic, Iv suspect Lana fatigue will have set in by next week and the numbers will drop.

I hope so. I also want Lana fatigue to set in. Maybe this will be SV's last season, after all? That is my fondest wish.

According to posts at K-site Legion out performed Bulletproof across the board. I don't know where this data came from so I can't vouch for accuracy but they seem accurate.
Legion

Bulletproof

I'm not trying to be a smartass, and maybe this has been asked before, but I don't understand how episode quality or main actor appearances has anything to do with the ratings. You have to have actually watched the episode to know it's bad, or to know who or who isn't in it, right? Wouldn't the episode *afterwards* have more bearing on episode quality than the episode itself? (I'm not counting premiers and heavily-promoted comics episodes and guest stars.)

I think you'd have to check, Marikology.

A check after an episode like Sleeper or Stride/Hero (not Promise because it had a hiatus before Combat) to see if the NEXT episode has a dropoff. You'd think a bad quality ep would affect the ratings of the next episode. For instance if there was a dropoff for Power, then I can see that as a backlash against the poor quality of Bulletproof, potentially.

IIRC, the only character who's presence has an effect on the ratings is Clark. Clark-centric episodes, which often happen to also be mythology-heavy episodes, have done pretty well. Episodes focused on Lex, Lana, Chloe, Lois or Jimmy - not so much.

Of course, other factors like episode scheduling (Lexmas was under-promoted and shown between a ton of repeats) preemptions in certain markets (which I think hit Progeny) and competition are important IMO. I think a big reason for the solid ratings in the beginning of the season was scheduling ten episodes in a row. The seemingly random pattern of new and repeat episodes, especially in the spring, kills a lot of Smallville's momentum, IMO... and gives me more time to think about how badly the crack monkeys are screwing things up.

There are a lot of factors involved, but this is on I personally like. My favorite example of what I like to call the "Salt the Earth!" theory is the 500,000 viewer drop between Promise and Combat. The retcons and OOC behavior were so bad that a half million viewers left, and never came back. Promise started a downward spiral of ratings that only started to turn around with Phantom, the season six finale.

OTOH, well promoted episodes with DC comics character often do really well - Run, Aqua, Cyborg and Arrow were all strong, IIRC, and Justice was the best rated episode of Smallville ever.

Of course, to get around this the promo monkeys do things like make deceptive promos (Static showed almost every Clark scene in the episode, while avoiding the Lexana A-Plot) or just flat out lying about episode content (Lois in promos for Abyss, Legion and Bulletproof.) Bad promo monkeys!According to Omar's reviews, Promise aired 3/15/07, and Combat aired 3/22/07.

Wait, I thought "Lineage" was the highest rated episode of the series. *confused*

I thought it was "Red." At any rate, Wikipedia indicates the pilot episode drew 8.4 million viewers, and I don't think "Justice" got anywhere near that. The show did better back when it was on the WB. But I believe "Justice" was by far the best-rated episode of its season.

Hee, another Clex classic! Perhaps that's why I was mixed up. Thank you for the info, EllyF! I never followed the ratings all that closely, but I couldn't shake that thought about "Lineage" and had to ask.

I think "Justice" was the highest rated episode of the series while at the CW.

According to this site it was Lineage with over 9 million viewers. Justice was the highest for Season 6...but that's not saying much IMO =).

Massena had a nice post regarding this a while back which is definitely worth reading. We were discussing the ratings I think for Toxic so "Last week" would be Plastique



Both episodes had about a quarter million more viewers in the 2nd half hour. (The reasons for this are explained in Massena's post). OTOH Bulletproof was essentially flat in the 2nd half hour.

Bulletproof via Pifeedback



The above are fast nationals. For overall finals (which usually go up slightly for SV) Toxic pulled 4.05 and Bulletproof came in at 3.85. So for those two episodes even though they started with essentially the same audience their final numbers were significantly different.

Cool. Thank you for clarifying that. I'd read somewhere it was Red, but perhaps that was just "the best ratings at the time," since Lineage came slightly later. All the early ratings make the current ratings look really sad, though. I would have expected the merger of the CW and UPN to LIFT the ratings, not lower them to their current pathetic levels.

Yeah. I think what's really sad is that it seems obvious to me in reviewing the graphs that SV never needed flashy guest stars or these completely wacked out plotlines they seem to be fixated on. Season's 1-3 were pretty formulaic with the characters struggling against outside influences and each other. Season 4 marked the first time they seemed to put Clark on this "quest" to find his destiny with the GSOK. I also don't think it's happenstance that Season 4 really started to dive when Lionel started being ambiguous good/evil guy.

I thought Season 5 would have showed them that "going back to the roots" as it were was where the ratings lie. It focused on the struggles of the core 4 with each other as well as outside forces (and probably would have done better if they had brought vanilla Lionel back and just pretended Season 4 never happened) with a core overarching villain (Brainiac).

I'm always puzzled at this show's PTB's insistence to ignore what works (season 5 WORKED well), and go back to everything that doesn't - because as far as I can tell, they have in their heads a story they want to tell, the way they want to tell and audience reaction be damned ie it doesn't matter if the audience isn't responding to their story and method in which they're telling it, it's the way they're doing it and that's that. It's like they sit in the writer's room convinced the audience reaction is wrong and don't try to change the way they do things, because they're right, they're PTBs and whatever they say goes.

I agree with this. They have acknowledged that Clana and Chimmy are overdone and unpopular, (respectively), can see that they drag down the ratings (Promise nosedive, Abyss Chimmy promotion), yet they have their characters still stuck in these relationships and storylines, to the point that their own characters are OOC (Martha: "Break up the wedding, son!") in order to keep them going. I am puzzled too.

Sweet. Thank you for hunting that down, Full Frontal!Really? I thought S5 was quite different from S1-3. Of course, I was watching for Clex and the Luthors and S5 did its best to seperate both relationships (even moreso than S4). The continued lack of focus on Lex and his motives (relegating him to "villain" rather than treating him like a charater) was also a big failure that year, imo. I thought S5 was confusing and uneven, for the most part; in retrospect, though, it's all a little more clear to me. Of course, that's a "YMMV" issue.

Heh, I don't have much of a point here, but I've often wondered what effect killing the Clex around mid-S3 and beyond had on the ratings. I think it would also be interesting to know how much of the ratings rise in S5 was due to viewers who might have returned after leaving during S4 and how many were new viewers altogether.

From pifeedback:



SV seems to stay pretty steady in viewer numbers lately, no matter what they throw at us.

Wow, the ratings recovered quite nicely from Bulletproof.

Huh, maybe Clana was exactly what the show needed.

Bite your tongue.

I'm sure I'll get my UCC card burned for saying this but when I was looking at some of the ratings graphs they do actually tend to spike when Clana is on good terms.

I guess when the alternative is Nois, Clana looks like a better option.

I won't, Full Frontal. Core Four always wins in my book. Frankly, since power seemed more LuthorCorp Experiments and Lana, it just looked interesting (where as Bulletproof, at least here, aired with the same pre-Legion promos, not the specific cop previews.)

Back in S5 Clana was happy (for a while) and their relationship was tolerable because suddenly it wasn't the focus of every episode. I think right now Clana is getting it's last hurrah and that would bring out some numbers, but I give Clana less credit as a draw than KK's final bow. Or we could credit AM's directorial debut. :)

I'm giving the bounce due to this, her fans know she directs this episode, it's been reported in online media, so the bounce was more for AM then Clana, considering there wasn't a huge burst for them in Bulletproof.

SV also grew at the half hour too. For comparison's sake, it fell last week...

1/29/09
4,060 1.6/5
4,296 1.8/5

1/22/09
3.80 1.5/ 5
3.78 1.6/ 4

The CW crows about Thursday's ratings.