What Fall Canning Season Might Mean for Stewart

What he's saying is that Stewart viewers purchase a lot of the products they see on her show -- more, on average, than do viewers of other programs.

From Quan's more neutral perspective, Stewart's series "hasn't performed to our expectations, but this season even the Donald Trump version of 'The Apprentice' hasn't performed as well as we thought it would. We knew there'd be some dropoff in his show, but we didn't expect this much."

Trump's show averaged more than 20 million viewers a week during its first edition, and last spring was still pulling in close to 14 million; this fall it has been averaging around 10 million.

"The expectation," Quan says of Stewart's series, "was that it would do fairly well -- that it wouldn't do gangbusters, but fairly well. Bringing in a second version of anything . . . in the movies in most cases you can't expect the sequel to do as well as the first one."

NBC injected yet another wrinkle into the equation last week, when it moved the Stewart "Apprentice" from 8 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays, swapping places with "The E-Ring," which had been underperforming at the later hour. At that point some observers concluded that the network had given up on the show. After all, it was getting trounced at 8 by reruns of "Lost." In the new time slot, its No. 1 competitor would be original episodes of that show.

In fact, says NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly, the move was a very basic programming decision: There was reality competition for Stewart at 8 in the form of Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance," which has since concluded, and UPN's "America's Next Top Model." And there was considerably more dramatic competition for "E-Ring" at 9.

Amid forecasts of doom, Burnett has remained guardedly hopeful.

"It's not over yet, and it's . . . possible this move might help," he said early last week, "although quite frankly I wish they'd left us at 8 o'clock. . . . Even though we'll be up against 'Lost,' maybe at 9 o'clock we'll find a different viewer."

At least that first time out, the move didn't cut into Stewart's ratings. She pulled in 6.3 million viewers, actually a small improvement over the previous week. Three weeks' worth of numbers begin to suggest that she has her audience of 6 million to 7 million viewers, and they'll follow her wherever she goes.

The schedule shift "absolutely was a benefit," says Tom Bierbaum, NBC's vice president for ratings and program information. "We focus on the rating in the adult 18-to-49 demographic, and she was up 19 percent there."

In fact Stewart had her best week yet with the 18-to-49 crowd, pulling an overall 2.5 rating. More encouraging still, he said, was that she gained in that demographic from one half-hour to the other, recording a 2.9 in the second half of her broadcast.

That's fine as far as it goes, but NBC averaged a 3.6 rating among 18-to-49-year-olds last season in the time slot, and a 3.6 is less than spectacular. Although nobody at the network will say so, it seems clear that a season's worth of 2.5s, or even 2.9s, isn't going to make anybody happy.