Ratings: ‘Malibu Country’ drops; ‘Shark Tank’ wins; ‘Top Model’ tops ‘Nikita’

Well, so much for the hope that ABC was going to revive TGIF with “Malibu Country” as well as “Last Man Standing.” Despite getting off to an incredible start just two weeks ago, the two sitcoms are now sinking like a stone and more likely to be canceled than stick around for a full season.

Let’s put this into perspective: the Reba McEntire series debuted to over a 2.0 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which is extremely rare for any show on Friday. (“Shark Tank” is the only other one to do so all fall.) However, now it is sitting at a 1.3, and is actually lagging behind its “Last Man Standing” lead-in after first starting out on top. What does this mean? Really, you have to chalk it up to two primary things:

1. Few people want to make commitment television out of a sitcom on Friday nights anymore.

2. Neither one of these sitcoms are really good enough to be worth of being commitment television.

The other sad thing is that the ratings drop here is leading to a drop in the “Shark Tank” figures as well; for the second straight week, the series dropped, and this time went below a 2.0 rating with a 1.9. With that being said, this is still the highest-rated Sunday night series by a pretty wide margin, even though “Grimm” over on NBC (which had a 1.6 this week) does a stellar job of pulling in DVR ratings.

Overall,  the only other figure really worth mentioning is that an “America’s Next Top Special” following the show’s finale Friday actually drew a better number in a 0.4 than most recent episodes of “Nikita” had in that time. Then again, you would expect this to be so given that you would expect the lead-in to be a bit more appropriate here than going from a fashion-themed reality show to an action thriller.