Hannibal ratings Better than NBC expected

Hannibal

performed better last night than many had feared given its brutal time period.

Coming in third place in NBC s 10 p.m. Thursday death slot against original episodes of ABC s Scandal and CBS Elementary the new crime drama had 4.3 million viewers and a 1.6 in the adult demo. That s NBC s best rating in the hour with entertainment programming in more than a year. It s up 78 percent from the debut of the short lived Do No Harm in January and climbed 45 percent from its special Go On lead in.

What s surprising is that NBC decided not to give Hannibal a lead in from The Voice on Tuesdays (instead NBC will use The Voice to launch the upcoming reality effort Ready for Love). The network has successfully used The Voice to support an apocalyptic drama (Revolution) and a couple sitcoms (Go On New Normal).

You could say that family friendly Voice isn t the ideal pairing for a Gothic crime show like Hannibal but neither was Go On. Frankly when you re performing battlefield surgery on a primetime lineup you don t have room for such distinctions. Creatively Hannibal is NBC s best new drama this season. It scored a higher average on Metacritic than any other of the network s freshman dramas and it deserved a bigger push at least a special post Voice preview airing for its premiere (instead NBC double pumped the struggling New Normal after The Voice this week). Hopefully the show can build in the coming weeks Chicago Fire showed it s possible to gradually grow a 10 p.m. audience on NBC this season. Check out our interview with showrunner Bryan Fuller talking about Hannibal s The Shining shout outs.

In fact I m going to embed the Hannibal pilot via Hulu in this post. It s below after the chart. See what you think.

On Fox American Idol declined to yet another all time low wait. What s that Idol went up Are you sure Sorry we are so used to writing about weekly Idol ratings drops out of habit. Idol improved 4 percent this week.

Fox continued to experiment with New Girl and Mindy Project in the 9 p.m. hour. Both are down about 8 percent from Tuesday but still beat NBC. Somewhere in Fox there s probably somebody doing calculations trying to figure out if a slightly lower rating for these shows if they were here permanently next fall would equal more revenue since advertisers pay more for Thursday shows.

Also Thursday NBC s Community hit a series low. CBS Big Bang Theory returned to about the same rating after being off for three weeks while Men was up 12 percent and POI and Elementary were down about 8 percent. ABC s Grey s Anatomy was down 7 percent while last week s EW cover subject Scandal perked up 4 percent resulting in the two soaps tying for only the second time in their history.

Full Chart

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