The Ratings Were Good, But the Show Was Marginal

The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox's attempt at a political satire show, did pretty well in the weekend ratings:

The ratings are in for The 1/2 Hour News Hour on FNC. The heavily-promoted premiere delivered 499,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo and 1,478,000 total viewers.

The show gained about 170,000 demo and around 300,000 total viewers from its lead-in. Half the viewers immediately tuned out, giving The Line Up just 231,000 demo and 787,000 viewers at 10:30pm.

> SF Chronicle, Feb. 16: "If 1.5 million viewers watched -- slightly less than Stewart's nightly 1.6 million audience and more than Colbert's 1.2 million -- Surnow said, 'it would be a huge number.'"

The show probably got a big tune-in thanks to Rush Limbaugh's promotion of the show to his 20 million views (Rush plays the president in a show-opening vignette). I found the show somewhat weak in overall content, and if it's going to get picked up for regular scheduling, it's going to have to get much better. Another episode will air March 4th, but I'm having my doubts that it will pull the same numbers.

I remember tuning in one night to Saturday Night Live just as they were doing the Weekend Update segment. That night the jokes were incredibly lame, and after each non-punch line was delivered, the cast would smirk like they'd just delivered the funniest comments ever. The whole thing just smacked of smug, and the folks at HHNH had better be careful that they don't fall into the same trap.

They're also going to have to make sure they feed the schedule to DirecTV. The show never appeared in my DirecTV program guide, and I had to manually record the time and channel in order to see it. That has happened before when special programming has been run on the Fox News Channel.