BBC America’s Season premiere of Doctor Who has put the cable channel in a position it is not usually used to. On top. The science fiction mainstay delivered 1.555 million viewers and 723,000 in the 25-54 age demographic. This made the network #1 in cable, excluding sports, among that demographic in the Saturday 9:00pm-10:00pm time slot. Matched with the third episode of BBC America’s first original series, Copper drove the network into having it’s highest ratings weekend ever.
To put this into perspective, we need only to look at the broadcast ratings for that night.
| rating | show | slot | network |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.5 | College Football Hawai’i at #1 USC | 7:30 Live | FOX |
| 3.0 | College Football Michigan vs Alabama | 8pm Live | ABC |
| 0.4 | CSI:NY “Brooklyn ‘Til I Die” (rerun) | 10pm | CBS |
| 0.4 | America’s Got Talent “Episode 19″(rerun) | 8pm-9 | NBC |
| 0.6 | Law & Order: SVU “Spiraling Down” (rerun) | 9pm | NBC |
| 0.7 | Law & Order: SVU “Official Story” (rerun) | 10pm | NBC |
| 0.7 | 48 Hours “Playing with Fire” (rerun) | 10pm | CBS |
| 0.8 | 48 Hours “Honor Killing” (rerun) | 10pm | CBS |
sources: spotted ratings and tv by the numbers
With each ratings point equaling 1 million viewers, the Doctor Who premiere episode “Asylum of the Daleks” did better than all but one broadcast channel in the night, the exception being the Michigan/Alabama game on ABC.
Meanwhile, Copper, in the live +7 ratings (designed to track those who watch the show through DVR technology), continues to bring in a million plus viewers each week, with it’s series premiere scoring an outstanding 2.754 million total viewers with 1.273 million being in the highly coveted 25-54 demographic.
Did you watch either show? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
About Mark Driscoll
When not ranting about the current state of his favorite comics or working on L33t, Mark spends a majority of his time renovating his newly purchased, 120 year old Victorian house. Badly. He is very bad at talking about himself in the third person, as he thinks it make him sound pretentious.
