View From the Phlipside - Early TV season check

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

I haven’t talked about TV much recently so I did a quick check at the TV ratings just to see what was going on.  At the moment there are no new shows that are really calling my name.  “Hawaii 5-0” looks interesting but that may be as much nostalgia on my part as anything else.

Looking at the Nielson ratings for the week ending on the 10th shows a couple interesting things.  First, none of the new shows is blowing the ratings apart.  Only “5-0”, Tom Selleck’s new cop show “Blue Bloods” and the comedy about two overweight folks falling in love, “Mike and Molly” make the top 25.  The Hawaiian retread is the top of the freshman class just edging out “Mike and Molly” at numbers 16 and 17.  “Bluebloods” patrols at 23.  Curiously at 24 is a show that I have never heard of, ever, despite the fact it’s in its third season apparently.  A nod therefore to “Castle” which is flying WAY under my radar.  The show is apparently about a mystery writer who follows a police detective around helping her solve crimes.  I had to look that up.  It was the only unfamiliar title on the list.

Not surprisingly at this time of the year the NFL shows up twice.  Which is a darn good thing because without those two Sunday Night Football slots NBC wouldn’t make the top 25 list AT ALL.  That’s right the Peacock network doesn’t have a single scripted or reality show in the top 25.  Ouch.

The top reality show also grabs two slots at #1 and #4.  That would be Dancing with the Stars.  Undercover Boss grabs the number two position in this category (#14 overall) ahead of “Survivor: Nicaragua” at 19 and “The Amazing Race” at #20.

Also thought it was interesting that only one CSI made the top 25 (the original surprisingly enough) while BOTH NCIS’s not only made the list the grabbed two spots in the Top 5.  The senior member of the group is clearly “60 Minutes” which after 42 years on the air still makes the Top 10.

So what does this tell us?  This year’s crop of new TV looks to be mid-season replacement bound, oldies can still be goodies, CBS is still the king of TV and NBC should be demanding that the NFL not stop at adding just two more games to the schedule.  A couple more months is probably closer to what they’d need.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.