Despite the absence of strong original competition, Fox’s new summer dating block premiered last night to some pretty ugly ratings. George Lopez’s Take Me Out and a Voice-like spin on dating via The Choice both performed rather lackluster; however, they were competitive enough to give their broadcast home the silver medal for the night.
Take Me Out found a 1.3 18-49 rating on the back of 3.3 million viewers. This is far from a warm welcome back for George Lopez who recently was canned from his basic cable talk show. In fairness, the show did have to go up against other mediocre reality competition in the form of ABC’s Duets which continues to struggle. The show posted a 1.2 in the key demographic with 5.2 million tuning in last night. While viewership is great to have, the broadcaster would rather have the higher demo number nine out of ten times. Both of those 8 PM shows lost the hour by a large margin though as The Big Bang Theory replayed to 8 million sets of eyes with a 2.1 18-49.
Moving onto 9 PM, The Choice actually won the hour in terms of the 18-49 demo with a meager 1.7 attached to 4.2 million viewers. While it is a good sign that the show managed to grow from its soft lead-in, this is not exactly a vote of confidence for a show with a ripped-off gimmick as those series’ tend to deteriorate following premiere week. Person of Interest won the viewership crown for the hour though with 6.9 million tuning in.
Rounding things off for Thursday, ABC’s summer series Rookie Blue ran a new episode to 5.4 million viewers and a 1.3 18-49 rating which is down a bit from the week prior.