Ratings Report Card: Tuesday Night

by Daniel Frankel
Sep 23rd, 2009 | 3:19 PM | Comments 23

The Fall season is off to a hot start at CBS. A night after Monday comedy-block moves yielded new Jenna Elfman series ‘Accidentally on Purpose‘ a nice start and veteran Chuck Lorre laffer ‘The Big Bang Theory‘ its best ratings ever, a full Tuesday night of hourlong dramas came up huge, too.

Meanwhile, ‘Jay Leno’ perked up significantly, while ‘Melrose Place’ continued to crater.

Here’s a look at how all of Tuesday night’s premieres graded out.

A+

NCIS (CBS) – The flagship series was up a whopping 28% over last year’s premiere, with 20 million people tuning in. Watch the season premiere here.

NCIS: LOS ANGELES (CBS) – Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J’s spin-off lost only 3% of the flagship’s audience at 9 p.m., scoring 18.3 million viewers. Even better, their debut in the same time period was 23% better than ‘The Mentalist‘ a year ago. Watch the series premiere here.

B

THE GOOD WIFE (CBS) – Julianna Margulies’ lawyer drama slipped significantly from its lead-in (’NCIS: LA’), but its 13.7 million viewers still led the 10 o’clock hour and represented an 11% uptick over the year-ago premiere of ‘Without a Trace‘ in the same slot. Watch the pilot episode here.

HELL’S KITCHEN (Fox) – Going against big-time scripted competition, a two-hour version of this Fox reality series managed to keep up the usual amount of flavor, a typical 6.8 million viewers and a 3.3 rating in adults 18-49, a very competitive number in that demo. Watch last night’s episode here.

THE JAY LENO SHOW – Scoring 6.8 million viewers and a 2.4 rating among adults, Jay saw a 33% increase from Monday night. If every night is like this for a show that costs pennies on the drama dollar to produce, every network will go talk show at 10 next fall. Watch last night’s episode here.

C

THE FORGOTTEN (ABC) – Maybe producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Warner Bros. TV and ABC (i.e. the guys who gave Christian Slater another series after ‘My Own Worst Enemy‘) should get a tutor. Opening with 9.5 million viewers, ‘Forgotten’ got clobbered by Margulies at 10 p.m. However, it was still ABC’s best drama premiere since 2006, so nobody’s getting expelled from school yet.

THE BIGGEST LOSER (NBC) – It fell 18% from last week (7.4 million viewers) going against better competish… but managed to lead some audience into ‘Leno’ and 10 p.m. Watch last night’s episode here.

D

DANCING WITH THE STARS (ABC) – The two-hour block scored 15.1 million viewers, a 26% drop from the same night last year and a 15% decline from Monday’s season opener. Watch last night’s episode here.

MELROSE PLACE (CW) – With 1.5 million viewers and a 0.8 rating among adults, new/old addition Heather Locklear needs to step on it. Watch full episodes here.