Jericho Rerun Report: Ratings Setback in Week Two

I won’t attempt to sugarcoat it: last night’s ratings results for Jericho’s second week of reruns were disastrous in almost every single way.

From Zap2it:

NBC’s “1 vs. 100” won the 8 p.m. hour with a 3.6/7. A pair of “George Lopez” reruns on ABC averaged 2.5/5, just beating FOX’s “Bones” for second. “Friday Night Smackdown!” drew a 2.4/5 for The CW. “Jericho” trailed with a 2.1/4 for CBS, about a point lower than its return last week.

“Smackdown!” moved into the lead at 9 p.m., finishing with a 2.9/6. A “Las Vegas” rerun on NBC was close behind at 2.8/6. A second “Jericho” rerun on CBS improved a bit to 2.4/4. “Standoff” posted a 2.2/4 for FOX. ABC aired an episode of “Greek.”

The show caused CBS to fall to fall to a tie for third in viewers/households, a pitiful last place in Adults 18-49, and it even dragged down the numbers for, well, Numbers at 10pm. After gaining some momentum from reairing the pilot, it was clear that new viewers who came from Ghost Whisperer last week didn’t stick around.

Needless to say, CBS is not going to be happy with these numbers. The disastrous numbers amongst younger viewers are especially concerning, and the drop in the night’s other programs makes Jericho out to be a black hole of viewership. It’s a terrible parallel to the mid-season hiatus, where Jericho went from freshman success to on the bubble with a single episode. The same has happened here, and it isn’t good.

But all hope is not lost. There are some things fans should do in order to improve this situation.

#1 – Reach out to Ghost Whisperer Fans

In the coming weeks, Jericho will go back to airing behind a rerun of Ghost Whisperer. These are the people that helped Jericho garner good numbers last week, but they didn’t stick around. If you can encourage them to stick around next week, they might just stick around for good.

#2 – Watch Numbers at 10pm

I know it’s late, but with Jericho numbers as low as they are it is clear that people aren’t watching CBS and therefore are not watching Numbers: it was #1 in its timeslot last week, but dropped slightly and into second place behind a Law & Order rerun last night. That’s a problem, and something that CBS doesn’t like to see. I know that CBS was the enemy in the beginning, but now you want them to succeed.

#3 – Continue Promoting the Series

To be honest, I don’t think that Jericho fans are doing enough to get the word out there. There are four million people who stopped watching this series over that hiatus who might be interested in picking it up again based on the second half of the series’ quality, but it seems as if there is no significant outreach to that market. A lot of these people are younger viewers, younger viewers the series desperately needs. Friends and family are fine, but if they’re not expanding the demos at all CBS is still going to have more than enough ammo.

There is still hope, here: CBS isn’t stopping the reruns or anything. But the lack of interest in just the series shows that more needs to be done to embrace those shows around it.