By Lisa de Moraes
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
In spite of navel-gazers' forecast that last Friday's presidential debate might become the most watched telecast in TV history, cracking 100 million viewers, the face-off between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama wound up drawing only about 52.4 million people.
While that's an audience the producers of "Do Not Disturb" would kill for, it's about 10 million viewers shy of the crowd that collected for the first presidential debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry on Sept. 30, 2004. That debate clocked 62.5 million viewers. In both 2004 and 2000, the first of the three presidential debates was the most watched.
The audience for the McCain-Obama verbal skirmish, moderated by PBS's Jim Lehrer, certainly didn't come near that amassed by the Mother of All Presidential Debates, the Oct. 28, 1980, smackdown between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, which bagged nearly 81 million viewers.
Of course, it didn't help that the first presidential debate of this election cycle took place on a Friday, one of the lowest TV-viewing nights of the week. This week's debate between the two vice-presidential candidates might do a bigger number for various reasons, not least of which is that it's scheduled for a Thursday -- one of the biggest TV nights of the week.
Also not helping drive viewers to last Friday's debate was the uncertainty as late as that morning that McCain would show up. The GOP nominee had announced earlier in the week he was suspending his presidential campaign and would not show up at the debate unless a deal to shore up Wall Street had been reached in Washington. (In the end, the debate happened, though the deal did not.)
Nielsen Media Research said its number for the McCain-Obama debate audience includes live coverage by ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, TeleFutura, Telemundo, BBC America, CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. The sum of the debate audiences on these 11 networks was, Nielsen said, 52,418,000.
PBS is not included in the Nielsen mash-up. The public television network said it believes another 2.6 million people watched the debate on its stations, an extrapolation based on 42 Nielsen overnight markets with PBS stations airing live debate coverage across all time zones. Nielsen said it cannot vouch for PBS's numbers. PBS also said in its news release that the debate drew "immense interest from Americans nationwide watching on television at home, at viewing parties and public spaces and on other platforms." Nielsen said it does not know where PBS got that information, given that Nielsen does not track viewing in public spaces and on other platforms in its debate stats.
We were not able to get in touch late yesterday with the three PBS reps whose names were on the news release to ask where the information came from.
ABC, meanwhile, said it logged the biggest debate audience of any individual network -- 11 million viewers.
Fox News Channel was next with an average audience of 8.2 million viewers; CBS drew 7.6 million; and NBC and CNN each clocked about 7.1 million.
Fox broadcast networks, which ran coverage anchored by Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith, logged 3.9 million viewers, which, ironically, is about as many people as chose to watch the debate on MSNBC.
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"Do Not Disturb" is officially the first cancellation of the 2008-09 TV season.
It is now safe for NBC to begin debuting the rest of its new series.
Fox yanked its new comedy series after airing just three episodes -- and just days after the producers sent a letter to some TV critics, asking to be forgiven "for being the perpetrators of such bad television," and sending an advance copy of another episode, asking the critics to give the show another chance.
The comedy starred Niecy Nash and Jerry O'Connell as the head of human resources and the sex-obsessed general manager, respectively, of an allegedly swank boutique hotel in Manhattan called the Inn.
Molly Stanton as an anorexic model, Jolene Purdy as a weight-obsessed reservations clerk and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as the gay head of housekeeping rounded out the stereotypes.
In its first broadcast, "DND" checked in only about 4.65 million viewers -- which is lousy but, if we're being fair, not nearly as lousy as the 6 million viewers enjoyed by its lead-in " 'Til Death" despite numerous plays in the post-"American Idol" time slot since its debut.
In its second week, "DND" fell to fewer than 4 million viewers and, last week, airing later than usual owing to President Bush addressing the country about the financial crisis, "DND" took another tumble, to about 3.6 million viewers.
Fox is the proud owner of four additional episodes of "Do Not Disturb."
O'Connell was scheduled to appear on NBC's "Tonight" show to plug the new Fox sitcom. He has cancelled, NBC reports, and was replaced by Robert Wagner. The Senior Lending Network's reverse-mortgage pitchman has been making the rounds, plugging his new autobiography, in which he reports having had an affair with Barbara Stanwyck when he was a lad in his 20s and she was recently divorced from Robert Taylor.
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Sean Puff Diddy Daddy and Mark Burnett will team for a reality series called "StarMaker," debuting in January, MTV announced late yesterday.
The show will differ from all the other singing competition series because this batch of aspiring solo artists will compete with the added pressure of . . . wait for it . . . living together!
Sean Puff Diddy Daddy's handpicked team of "star makers" will put contestants through the rigors of "StarMaker" boot camp, MTV said. They will be judged not only on how well they perform in front of an audience but also how well they handle photo shoots, deal with paparazzi, and drive a car away from a Hollywood nightclub while hammered. Okay, I made that last one up.
"StarMaker" is the latest "reality" TV series Sean Puff Diddy Daddy has executive-produced for MTV networks; others include "Making the Band," "Run's House" and "I Want to Work for Diddy."
Burnett's unscripted TV series include "Survivor," "The Apprentice," "Rock Star," "The Contender" and "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"
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