‘Jersey Shore’ season 6 ratings plummet; are two-hour blocks, spinoffs to blame?

Maybe MTV had a feeling that “Jersey Shore” was starting to lose some steam going into 2012, but we have to say that we really do not quite understand what the network’s strategy has been exactly when it comes to promoting this show. First, they decided to overkill the franchise by having something on their network about them for almost every Thursday from January onward; and then, they also made the call to run the first two episodes of the show’s final season as two-hour blocks. It’s really a strange move, and it feels almost as though the network is burning off episodes of their highest-rated series for no real reason at all.

Thanks to this and other possible reasons (including just a lack of interest by many at this point), the ratings for the show are the lowest they’ve been in years. For Thursday night’s two-hour block, “Jersey Shore” averaged around 3 million viewers and a 1.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic. We used to tout this as one of the strongest shows on all of cable, but this week, it was defeated handily by such competition earlier in the week as “Duck Dynasty” and “Sons of Anarchy.” The Vice-Presidential debate may have strangely also taken away some of the show’s bite, as it delivered some pretty huge numbers across the board on both cable and broadcast networks.

Hopefully, the show will turn around for one primary reason: we would absolutely hate to see something that was once such a ratings monster go out with more or less a whimper. However, this does seem to be the way in which things are going at the moment, and it needs to find a way to turn it around … and fast.

What do you think about the show’s numbers?