Gays of our Lives (June 16, 2009)

RATINGS AND RANKINGS
Raising the Bar returned for its second season, garnering over 3.5 million viewers, higher than the average number of viewers who watched last season … The season premiere of Weeds pulled in 1.2 million viewers while Nurse Jackie garnered 1.35 million viewers. Those combined numbers gave Showtime one of its biggest nights ever. The network responded by renewing Nurse Jackie for a second season.

In New Zealand, Shortland Street was the country’s most watched soap with an average of 603,000 viewers, topping Coronation Street, which garnered an average of 586,000 viewers. For some perspective, the most watched show in New Zealand is reality program Border Patrol, with 780,000 viewers.

Both The Young and the Restless and As The World Turns suffered huge ratings drops last week. It was particularly bad for ATWT, which lost over 229,000 viewers from the previous week, hitting new ratings lows and placing it back in the 7^th spot. Y&R, while remaining number one, lost about 150,000 viewers from the previous week.

So how did Kings do in its return to the airwaves last Saturday night? In a word: Terrible. The glossy political soap scored the lowest ratings of any show of the night and came in a distant third in its time slot against reruns on the other networks. Given that NBC usually airs reruns of crime dramas in that time slot and gets twice the ratings, will they let the show finish out its run as they promised ... or pull it again? Stay tuned.

Good Times, Bad Times was the top rated soap in the Netherlands, last week averaging 1.1 million viewers or about 21% of the audience. And the second highest rated soap? That would be As The World Turns, which is very popular there. The show, airing episodes already shown in the U.S. (Luke is still paralyzed), averaged 367,000 viewers or 18.2% of the audience last week. ATWT gets better ratings than the countries’ other soap, Onto Tomorrow.

SNAPSHOTS – MORE SHADES OF THORE