Ratings: ‘Once Upon a Time’ drops while ‘The Mentalist,’ ‘Revenge’ improve

When it just comes to a variety of programming being on TV, there are few nights of TV as competitive as what we saw on Sunday. In addition to baseball and football airing on two broadcast networks, you also had cable with a heavy presence courtesy of “The Walking Dead,” “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” reunion, “Dexter,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and “Homeland.” However, most shows found a way to work things out and even improve their ratings on some occasions.

The one surprising note here is “Once Upon a Time.” While “Revenge” actually rose up to a 2.7 rating, the fairy tale drama scored just a 3.0 despite once again being a pretty high-quality episode. What’s happening here? Really, we just blame sports and “The Amazing Race,” which continues to be a machine with a 2.6 rating that rarely drops or changes.

Elsewhere on TV, the main things worth noting are that “The Good Wife” (1.7) and “666 Park Avenue” (1.5) are continuing to struggle, but the latter show is really the only one in danger considering that it is just three episodes in and is still continuing to drop. Meanwhile, “The Mentalist” actually rose a 2.0 rating this week, which may be the first sign that CBS did not make an absolutely awful decision to move a show that was performing well on Thursday to a night in Sundays where it has struggled so far (and airing after football also probably does not help). Considering that CBS is struggling worse elsewhere at the moment, they probably won’t make any changes to this lineup for the time being.

What did you catch Sunday, and did any of these numbers surprise you?