Fall-TV Season: The Body Count Begins

A few ratings – well, it’s hard to call them highlights – from the past weekend:

If Fox’s reality show “Nashville” isn’t the first cancellation of the young season, Terry Bradshaw must have something on his bosses at the network and is forcing them to keep his spoiled daughter on the air. It debuted to a lousy 2.7 million viewers, and dropped to 2.19 million on Friday.

On Sunday, The CW reached what could be historic lows ratings-wise, and that’s saying something. It may have seemed like a good idea to put pop-culture magazine shows on Sundays – they’re cheap and require next-to-no effort to produce – but it turns out that teenagers don’t need yet another outlet to tell them what to buy and to watch, no matter how superficially and condescending they may be. They have cell phones for that.

“CW Now” had a mere hair over 1 million viewers; “Online Nation” had even fewer, 994,000. To put this into perspective – less than 1/300th of the country tuned into a “broadcast” network’s launch of its fall programming. HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me” got a similar viewership when it premiered, in a quarter as many TV homes, and that was considered a major disappointment. These were the lowest ratings for any programming in the hour in the history of The CW and The WB (UPN was dark on Sundays).

A repeat of “Gossip Girl” that followed at 8 p.m. drew an equally wan 1.16 million viewers, with a repeat of “America’s Next Top Model” perking up – but just barely – with 1.9 million at 9 p.m.

This bodes ill for when “Life is Wild” debuts on Oct. 7. If The CW hasn’t figured out a fix or two, that show, too, could arrive DOA.

On CBS, “Cold Case” had 12.3 million viewers and “Shark” had 11.5 million, which isn’t bad unless you note that “Cold Case” was down nearly 4 million viewers from last season’s premiere and that “Shark” was down more than 3 million (and that last year, “Without a Trace” debuted in the same timeslot with 17.5 million).

The news wasn’t all terrible: Fox’s cartoons performed similarly to last season’s debuts, with “The Simpsons” with 9.4m, “King of the Hill” with 7.74 and “Family Guy’s” “Star Wars parody drawing a strong 10.86m. All three shows did quite well in the sought-after 18-49 demographic.

Football, of course, won the night with 16.87 million viewers.

Needless to say, not an auspicious start to the season for the networks. They’re not needed quite yet, but life-support machines should be kept at the ready just in case.