Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Liz & Dick’ hardly a ratings gem for Lifetime

When Lifetime invested all of that time, money, and quite frankly patience into their Lindsay Lohan TV movie “Liz & Dick,” odds are they were expecting it to go a little bit better than this. Instead, what they ended up having on their hands here was a critical flop that also turned out to be a bit of a commercial disappointment given how much the tabloids had been building up this project coming on TV.

Overall, the two-hour flick Sunday night, which was in an incredibly-competitive timeslot against new programming and NFL football, drew a total audience of 3.5 million people. This number is solid in some ways in that it is higher than most of the network’s TV movies from last year, but at the same time it was also only their fourth-most-popular TV movie of this year. We don’t think this can be chalked up as a failure by any means, but you have to imagine that the network was expecting a little bit more from something that was not always the easiest project to film given some of Lohan’s legal woes.

So what do these numbers mean for the future of Lindsay on TV? At the moment, it’s not looking good. If she is not a significant ratings draw, it is hard to see many networks being willing to go through the trouble of dealing with all of the headlines. Then again, you could also make the argument here that many viewers may have heard about the lambasting “Liz & Dick” took from critics, and decided instead that they would just put Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor on their DVR just so they did not get sucked into two hours of what may have just been a very bad end product.

What do you think: is “Liz & Dick” going to lead to Lohan having problems landing gigs in the future?