Ratings: ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog’ does little business in primetime debut
Sometimes with ratings, it’s all about perspective; and as excited as we were to see “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” appear on TV for the first time on The CW Tuesday night, it was hard to be thoroughly excited about it. Why? It’s a series designed for the web that has been free to watch for years, and we’ve literally already seen it a dozen times. Plus, those Joss Whedon fans who want a TV experience have likely already purchased the DVD.
With all of this being said, it was really hard to expect much from Dr. Horrible and company on Tuesday night, and this was reflected with the special scoring just a 0.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic and slightly over half a million viewers. This is significantly lower than the 0.4 rating brought in by the “Hart of Dixie” lead-in, though we have a feeling that The CW was probably not that thrilled about the show losing that big of a chunk of its audience, either, compared to the 0.7 it premiered with last week.
So what does this mean for the future of the “Dr. Horrible” franchise? Not much, really. Had there been maybe 2 million viewers who tuned in, we could have seen this as some sort of indication that Whedon and company would greenlight a sequel fast with the backing of a network. However, it’s hard to take this sort of viewership as any indication at all that a sequel will or will not happen, mostly because we think this audience would have at least tripled if the CW had been airing a new hour-long show with the same actors, and that no one had ever seen before.
Stay tuned, as well will have more ratings news from the rest of the primetime lineup soon.
Update: Elsewhere, it really does feel as though we are starting to see most of the new programming start to level off. “Go On” and “The New Normal” each rose versus last week to a 2.8 and 2.0 rating, and Fox’s lineup also seemed to stay steady versus last week. With a 1.5 “Ben and Kate” is clearly the show in the most trouble, and we actually wish the show kept the title of “Ben Fox is My Nanny.” However, the 1.9 rating for “The Mindy Project” helped to justify its full-season renewal.
“The Voice” won the night with a 4.4 rating, which marks its strongest Tuesday performance of the season.