Hazy “Moonlight”

CBS cancelled “Close to Home” last season not because it did poorly but because viewers it did well with were outside that coveted 18-49 demographic.

At least someone was watching it.

In the same timeslot this past Friday, CBS’s new, giddily dumb vampire-private-detective drama “Moonlight” debuted, with 8.62m viewers. That’s down from the nearly 12m watching “Close to Home” last year. NBC’s aging “Las Vegas” had more viewers. “Moonlight” did, however, come in first in the 18-49 category, though even “Close to Home” did better there, as well.

Overall, Friday was pretty much a disaster, with light sampling everywhere. (CBS’s returning shows, “Ghost Whisperer” and “Numb3rs,” lost 1.66m and 2.18m fans from their premieres last season.) Friday’s becoming the new Saturday, and you wonder if the networks can really afford to turn out the lights on Fridays the way they have on Saturday.

Maybe everyone was recording all these shows, and the networks will be able to scramble and say they picked up a couple hundred-thousand viewers here and there from TiVo users. But from the networks’ standpoints, the new season has thusfar proven to be underwhelming at best and pretty scary at worst. We’re approaching the day when the word “broadcaster” will be a quaint, antiquated relic of a TV landscape that no longer exists. (Ah, hyperbole - thank you for existing, or this would've been a pretty dull entry!)