After months of gearing up to move to a new network, Cougar Town finally premiered its fourth season on TBS on Tuesday night. The show definitely landed somewhere in TBS’ ratings ballpark—which is good news for those still watching—but the numbers weren’t so hot when compared to what Cougar Town used to do on ABC.
By the end of its third season on ABC, Cougar Town was pulling in between 3 and 5 million total viewers an episode. That’s not really a success for an ABC drama, but for TBS, those numbers are quite high. If Cougar Town had even managed to retain most of its audience, the network’s move to purchase the Courteney Cox-led program would have been a sound decision. Unfortunately, according to EW, only 2.2 million viewers tuned in to the premiere episode.
Often a show’s season premiere will draw the best numbers, but it’s still possible fans are not aware that the new season has started on TBS, so there is a chance viewers will move over in the coming weeks to give the show another shot. Additionally, TBS is noting that of the 2.2 million viewers, 1.3 million were in the coveted 18-49 demographic, which bodes a little better for advertisers. TBS is certainly not looking at a disaster with Cougar Town (yet), but it’s a little sad that the show did worse last night than the network’s original series Men at Work, which did 2.6 million during its first episode run. That’s bad news for a show that should, theoretically, have an audience built in.
TBS’ Cougar Town airs on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET.
