Wednesday ratings: Tough as Nails premiere; The 100 prequel pilot

There were a couple of things we were curious about when it comes to Wednesday’s television ratings, and it kicks off with the premiere of Tough as Nails. CBS was hoping that their new venture with Phil Keoghan would prove to be a solid success … and “solid” seems to be the right way to describe it. The ratings aren’t good enough that they’re worth shouting from the heavens, but they’re decent enough to make us think the show has a chance of coming back, provided they remain at this level for the rest of the summer.

Across its two-episode premiere last night, Tough as Nails drew a 0.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic and more than 4 million live viewers. This doesn’t come close to matching the demo numbers put up by Big Brother during the summer, but it’s a better performance than what we’ve seen from a lot of other network shows this summer. We’ll see where things go over the coming weeks.

As for the prequel pilot that aired during last night’s The 100, we can’t sit here and say that we’re super-optimistic for its future. The good news is that with close to 690,000 live viewers, this marks the best audience for an episode of The 100 in more than a month. However, it also drew just a 0.1 rating in the demo, which keeps the show at its lowest-ever figure there. We’re not sure that The CW will greenlight a spin-off when it isn’t drawing better ratings than this from the get-go. It really comes down to whether or not The CW thinks that they can either bring in old The 100 fans or people to the prequel who have never seen the show before.

No matter the ratings for any of these shows, let’s go ahead and reiterate this — we’re just happy that there is still some new programming to talk about at a time when there isn’t a lot of it really out there.

Photo: CBS