Alec Baldwin may have a memorable thing going for him on NBC's Saturday Night Live, but over on ABC, his new primetime series didn't fare so hot. The actor and now host kicked off new series The Alec Baldwin Show on Sunday night. The ratings were probably not what anyone involved with the show was hoping.
The Alec Baldwin Show kicked off with just a .4 rating in the coveted 18-49 advertising demo, who were probably all over at NBC watching Sunday Night Football. Just over 2.2 million total viewers watched the new program, which had actually pulled in Robert De Niro and Taraji P. Henson, so it wasn't lack of interesting talent that kept people away.
In fact Sunday Night Football does really command a lot of TV households' attentions on Sunday nights. That program drew a 6.1 rating in the advertising demographic, which is really high for network TV these days. People were clearly more interested in watching The New England Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs than they were to watch Alec Baldwin and Robert De Niro talk about the Trump administration.
The real reason The Alec Baldwin Show's rating is a disappointment is not because the new talk series lost to football but because it lost to everything that aired during primetime on Sunday night. The CW also launched a new series this Sunday, the oft-discussed Charmed reboot. Even that show nabbed a .5 rating as did the new Supergirl season premiere.
Compared to shows on some of the other networks, the Alec Baldwin Show had a worse rating than the other later program, Madam Secretary, which nabbed a .6 rating over on CBS. Fox's new sitcom Rel did a .5 rating, as well, according to TV By The Numbers. So, The Alec Baldwin Show really had the worst numbers, both for a debut or returning show on Sunday night.
As noted prior, the new series did attempt to be political. Alec Baldwin has been outspoken about his dislike for President Donald Trump and he and Robert De Niro touched on the topic during The Alec Baldwin Show. There's no indication regarding whether or not this helped or harmed the talk show's ratings, but political talk was certainly a portion of the episode.
We'll have to wait and see how Alec Baldwin's new show fares moving forward. It does air later in the night on Sunday, so it's doubtful that ABC was hoping for excessively high ratings for the new talk series. However, I don't think it would be out of reason that the network would hope the show would do better than programming on a traditionally lower-rated network, like The CW.
This coming week, Alec Baldwin has Kim Kardashian slated to appear on The Alec Baldwin Show. We'll have to wait and see if that will bump the numbers up a little more than Robert De Niro. If you want to take a look, the talk show airs on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET. Take a look at the other shows coming up with our full fall schedule.
