All Things About
Ratings for the week of October 3-7, 2011 have not come out for soap operas as of this writing, but ratings for “The Chew” are! The talk show that replaced “All My Children” in the ABC Daytime lineup is now down to an average of just 1.78 million viewers tuning in for cooking advice according to Marc Berman of TV Media Insights.
ABC’s flagship station will likely leave some New York soap fans upset Monday when the affiliate pre-empts “The Chew” and “One Life to Live” for continuous coverage of the 67th Annual Columbus Day parade, relegating both shows to the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Marc Berman of TV Media Insights has been doing an excellent job in reporting the overnight ratings data for ABC’s new daytime talk show “The Chew,” which replaced soap opera “All My Children” in the 1:00 PM ET/12:00 PM PT timeslot on Monday, September 26. Since the talker debuted it has lost ground compared to “AMC’s” performance at the same point last year in television households. Now more than a week since its debut, Berman has revealed that the show is also losing ground in the all important Women 18-49 sales demographic compared to how “All My Children” had performed as well.
Nelson Branco, best known as the writer of the popular Suds Report column for website TV Guide Canada and his contributions to magazine Hello! Canada is back! This time he’s Uncensored. With Soap Opera: Uncensored fans of Branco will notice the same writing style from his Suds Report, which includes an interview, translated comments on daytime moves, a breakdown of what’s happening on each soap and his uber popular Blind Items.
A few weeks ago an insider informed us that a 1.7 is the lowest acceptable point a daytime program can reach in households before television networks begin to worry about the future of the program on their daytime schedules (ten years ago it was a 2.7). After four days on the air, “The Chew” has hit that benchmark.
Each week Entertainment Weekly puts together “The Bullseye,” a gathering of images in which “pop culture news that was right on target” for the week comes together leading to the “events that missed the mark.” For its October 7, 2011 issue, the magazine placed a “Bullseye” on “The Chew’s” Mario Batali.
“All My Children’s” television run comes to an end, “The Chew” debuts in its place, and “One Life to Live” asks fans to sample Ford’s wiener.
Although ABC did not expect “The Chew” to outperform “All My Children” every day nor did they expect it to beat it in the long-run, after all the ultimate goal is to save money by producing a cheaper show, the network should still be a little worried about “Chew’s” performance after three days of ratings data have been released.
One day on the air and “The Chew” is already beating “All My Children’s” most recent performance in Total Viewers and the key sales demographic of Women 18-49. The new food and lifestyle talk show also beat the soaps season to date performance for the 2010-2011 television season that concluded on Friday, September 16.
“All My Children’s” replacement show “The Chew” debuts today, just three days after “AMC” aired its final episode on ABC, and I can’t help myself in wishing it would just go away. No, it isn’t the show or what it is all about. In a perfect world I’d care to watch it from time to time, after all we all have to cook good and healthy meals don’t we? But it is the way the network went about handling “The Chew” which included non-stop advertising during “AMC’s” final weeks on television along with non-stop advertising on soap opera centered websites including Soap Opera Network that I find myself saying “what a way to spit on your audience.”
