Ratings: ‘How To Live with Your Parents’ surprises, helps ABC’s ‘Nashville’

For a solid four seasons now, ABC has been looking for some sort of reasonably companion to “Modern Family” on Wednesday nights, whether it be “Happy Endings,” “Cougar Town,” “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23,” “The Neighbors,” or “Suburgatory.” However, all of these shows had one thing in common: they were not really able to draw in significant enough numbers for the lead-in that the network had.

However, it looks based on some early signs that the network may be a little happier with “How To Live with Your Parents,” the new comedy starring Sarah Chalke and airing in this timeslot. The show drew a 2.9 rating in the 18-49 demographic for its half-hour, which is the strongest performance we’ve seen from a show here really since the start of the season. While this is a premiere figure and it will probably decrease, even staring around a 2.4 could be enough to convince ABC to order more episodes.

“Modern Family” recovered from a low performance last week and won the night with a 4.1, beating “American Idol” (3.0) by a pretty significant margin. “Nashville” was also seemingly helped by the new comedy’s strong premiere, as it rose to a 1.7 rating this week, which happened to be enough to give it a victory over NBC’s “Chicago Fire” (1.6).

The only other thing really worth noting here is that with a 1.4 rating, “Dateline NBC” ended up faring far better for its network than “Whitney” was doing for most of the year against “American Idol.” Could this be a change to a comedy-free Wednesday night for NBC? We wouldn’t be stunned.

Do you think Chalke’s new show will be able to keep this up? If you want to read some more ratings news for “Nashville,” you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: ABC