Unsurprisingly, Two and a Half Men’s second episode showed a steep drop in ratings from last week’s premiere, but also unsurprisingly, the series still showed numbers well above the norm for a scripted comedy. Meanwhile, Terra Nova did just-ok given the hype, and The Playboy Club dropped substantially from last week’s season premiere.
Deadline posted the numbers, starting with Two and a Half Men. While many of us tuned in last Monday to see how Ashton Kutcher did on his first episode of the series, fewer tuned in again last night to keep watching. The comedy was down 30% from last week, and yet it still managed to score 20 million viewers, which is nothing to shake a stick at. CBS’ Mike and Molly premiered its second season to an audience of 14 million (4.9/11), bumping it up a whopping 26% from last season’s premiere. It’s probably fair to attribute that to a combination of Men’s current boost in popularity, not to mention star Melissa McCarthy’s recent Emmy win and likely boost in fans due to her fantastic performance in the film Bridesmaids
Fox’s new adventure drama Terra Nova premiered last night with a two-hour episode, bringing in 9 million viewers. That’s really just-ok for a start. Not a flop, but not a gigantic premiere. We’ll have to wait to see how many viewers it holds in its second episode before speculating on whether or not the series is in trouble. As Deadline points out, there was a football game on ESPN last night, which may have kept some of the potential male viewers from tuning in to Fox for the new series.
Speaking of trouble, The Playboy Club may be in some if things don’t start to improve soon for the series. The ’60’s drama dropped 19% from last week’s premiere, earning a 1.3/3 rating. Hopefully NBC will consider moving it to another time-slot to give it a better shot at building an audience. TPC certainly wouldn’t be the first series that suffered after starting out on a Monday night at 10 time-slot. (See also, Life, Chase, Journeyman, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Black Donnellys).
