Ratings: Lady Gaga, ‘Glee’ no match for Thanksgiving or the NFL

It was seemingly inevitable that “Glee” was going to take a little bit of a beating courtesy of NFL football, but just be honest here: Who expected the show to fall as much as it did? With the ratings that the music comedy drew for Thanksgiving, we imagine that the executives over at Fox are really regretting giving the show another full season after this one.

Not even more Adam Lambert or Lady Gaga could offset competition from the holiday or the NFL, so the episode “Puppet Master” languished with just a rating of 0.9 in the 18-49 demo. This is the sort of miserable number that typically makes most network executives run cry in a corner. While this was designated a “special” by Fox and it won’t hurt against the rest of the ratings, it’s still pretty awful. Even with good DVR numbers, it’s pretty clear that this once-proud franchise is now near the end of its pop-culture relevance. As for “The X Factor,” we really expected it to be at a 1.0 rating. It wasn’t pulling numbers this season that were much better than this in the first place.

Another surprise here came as the Lady Gaga Thanksgiving special with The Muppets flopped, and only scored a 0.9 that was on par with “Glee.” This suggests that only Gaga purists caught this, and everyone else decided to sleep off their turkey haze. This is somewhat reflective of some of her other recent works; Gaga has done a great job finding herself a devoting following, but she has also become so controversial at times that there are many out there who won’t even give her a chance.

The ratings tonight are not expected to be significantly better, mostly because there is not that much in the way of new programming, and there is also going to be a big chunk of people either traveling home following the end of the holidays, or people who are too busy out trying to clobber other people for Black Friday deals.

Photo: Fox