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"Lost" Hit by Battleship Patinkin
Forget the Others. The greatest single threat to the survival of Oceanic Air Flight 815's castaways may just be Mandy Patinkin.
On Wednesday night, the mild-mannered star of stage, screen and Crestor commercials saw his two-season-old CBS crime drama, Criminal Minds, come within about 200,000 bodies of toppling ABC's Lost.
For the 9 p.m. hour, Lost tallied 16.9 million viewers; Criminal Minds, 16.7 million, Nielsen Media Research stats said.
That was the closest Criminal Minds has come yet to Lost during a regular-season matchup. And it was the latest sign that ABC's former Emmy winner has shoring up to do with its fan base.
CBS declared Wednesday's results a "virtual tie," and boasted that Criminal Minds beat Lost for the first time ever in household ratings. (As opposed to total viewers, which is akin to an old-fashioned headcount, household ratings represent the percentage of TV homes that are tuned to a particular show.)
Unbowed, ABC declared Lost the most watched show of the hour, and proclaimed it the highest-rated show of the night among demographically desirable 18-to-49-year-olds.
Still, the show was down 10 percent in viewers from last week's third-season premiere, which itself was down 20 percent in viewers from its second-season premiere.
Second-season characters and plotlines, such as Michelle Rodriguez's Ana-Lucia and "They enter the hatch," have taken the brunt of blame for the listing Lost, at least at Jump the Shark, where the site's users debate the exact moment when Lost became lost.
But for all the suggested reasons as to where the show has gone wrong, the Jump the Shark category that has elicited the most votes is the one that suggests nothing has gone wrong: "Never jumped."
Ratings-wise, Lost isn't so much freefalling, as Criminal Minds is skyrocketing. Last season, Lost averaged 15.4 million viewers; Criminal Minds, 12.5 million.
Criminal Minds is making up some, but not nearly as much ground with young viewers. On Wednesday, Lost held a 53 percentage point advantage in the 18-to-49 demo over the show starring the cholesterol-lowering medicine pitchman.
Elsewhere on Wednesday, ABC's leaks in the 10 p.m. hour got much leakier. In its second week, The Nine (8.3 million viewers) held onto to less than half of its Lost's lead-in.
By comparison, CBS' CSI: NY (17.8 million) picked up where Criminal Minds left off at 10 p.m., and added more than 1 million viewers before its hour was up.
Over at NBC, the new comedies 30 Rock (8.1 million) and Twenty Good Years (7.1 million) looked pretty weak in their premieres, until, that is, further looking reminded that the network hasn't done any better this season in the 8-9 p.m. period.
Also, 30 Rock, NBC's latest Saturday Night Live-inspired series, wasn't too far off from the sort of numbers that the network considers to be renewal-worthy for My Name Is Earl and The Office.
But a warning to the Tina Fey faithful: NBC issued no press release to spin the 30 Rock premiere, usually a sign it doesn't have anything to spin.
The network also held its tongue on Dateline NBC, which aired at 10 p.m. in place of the Saturday-banished Kidnapped. Instead, NBC preferred to look to the future, to a Wednesday with viewers. To that end, the network announced it was calling Medium back to service a few months ahead of schedule, and deploying it at 10 p.m. on Wednesdays starting Nov. 15.
CBS, meanwhile, indicated Jericho will be in business for months to come. The nuclear-fallout drama, bringing joy to 10.9 million on Wednesday, received a full-season pickup on Thursday.
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