New Melrose Place: Hit, Bomb or Neither?

Wed., Sep. 9, 2009 12:10 PM PDT by Joal Ryan

How did the new Melrose Place do? How did the newish 90210 do? And why is Jon Gosselin suddenly looking old?

The answers—and more questions—in the latest TV ratings quiz:

1. All those ads! All that hotness! How could Melrose Place lose? If it draws fewer viewers than every other show in its time slot. Which it did.

2. What happened? Nothing out of the ordinary. The CW is not a broadcaster in the literal sense of the word broad. In truth, Melrose Place did all right by its network, scoring a bigger audience than its predecessor, the canceled Privileged, averaged last year.

3. Unfair question: How did the new Melrose Place match up against the old Melrose Place? Back in 1992, the premiering Fox soap finished 19th in the weekly broadcast rankings. With its audience of an estimated 2.3 million viewers, the new MP would have finished about 176th place in the latest Nielsen standings. Among cable shows.

4. What's the bad news for 90210? Last night's second-season premiere was watched by about half as many people as last fall's launch.

5. What's the good news for 90210? Last night's show marked the show's most-watched episode since January, the CW said, and marked an improvement over its freshman season average: estimated 2.6 million viewers versus 2.2 million.

6. What's up with Jon Gosselin? Not interest. Last night's ABC News prime-time special, featuring more of Gosselin's sit-down with Chris Cuomo, ranked third, or last, in its 10 p.m. time slot, behind a repeat of The Mentalist and the second hour of America's Got Talent. Things were even slower on cable, where a new episode of TLC's Jon & Kate Plus 8 drew a Melrose Place-sized audience.

7. What was the upset of the week? HGTV's Design Star, not Lifetime's Project Runway, was the most-watched cable reality show.

8. What's that chortling sound? If it's the one we're hearing, it's Bravo execs noting that their hot Real Housewives of Atlanta came within about 125,000 viewers of outdoing their ex, Project Runway.

9. Is anything hotter than Twitter? Fox's so-called director's-cut version of the Glee pilot outdid the so-called "tweet-peat" version by a two-to-one margin.

10. Now that the fall TV season has sorta begun, will next week's Top 10 standings look much different? As long as the CW is the only one rolling out the new shows, no. America's Got Talent, Big Brother, Hell's Kitchen, Wipeout and NCIS reruns aren't going anywhere, until, well, new NCIS episodes hit the air.