“American Idol” was still #1 in its time slot, but its audience was off 10% year-to-year.
Last night’s premiere pulled in 30.1 million viewers with an 11.6 rating/28 share in the 18-49 demo, according to Variety. That’s a 10-percent drop from last year’s 33 million viewers, and seven-and-a-half million off of the sixth season’s series high for premieres. What’s more worrisome for Fox is the dip in the younger demographic–last night’s show was off 16 percent in the 18-49 age group, and 25 percent in the 18-34 age group (maybe the young kids aren’t as dumb as I thought).
However, Fox can also let out a sigh of relief…30 million people is still good enough to be tops for any show this season (including sports broadcasts) and the drop-off wasn’t as much as some people expected. The concern here on out is whether the changes made to this season (new judge, less audition time) will have a positive or negative effect on the show’s ratings. As a friend of mine said, the auditions are acceptable television watching, the rest is not.
My wife and I used to watch the auditions to laugh at all the train wrecks then we’d bail on the show once it hit Hollywood. I don’t know what the writer’s friend considers to be “acceptable television watching,” but we sure got a kick out of the tonedeafness (is that a word?) and cluelessness of a good portion of the contestants. Once we heard they were scaling back on the train wrecks, we crossed it off our playlist.
I wonder if the audience will fall further now that people have had a chance to see the “new” version of the show.
