Let's do the numbers...

Ever since the show was cancelled, I keep getting asked about our numbers. And thanks to the good folks over at The Futon Critic, I can provide them. Now one thing about numbers—there are lots of ways to slice them including important things like the demographics, the number of people who watch live vs. time shifted, and stickiness (how often a DVR viewer skips commercials). But partly because it’s self-serving, and partly because it’s easiest, I’m using what are called “Live + 7” numbers which reflect the total audience who watched live or engaged in DVR playback within 7 days of the original broadcast.

So with that in mind, for all my friends and interlocutors, here are the stats…

In our second season (2009) Raising the Bar averaged just under four million viewers a week (3,961,000).

That’s more than any show on A&E, ABC Family or AMC—and yes, that includes Mad Men which averaged about two and a half million a week (2,496,000) and Breaking Bad (1,628,000).

And the other shows I’m regularly asked about?

South Park (which I love) had 3,481,000 viewers (but kicked our asses in 18-49)

Damages had about a third as many viewers at 1,398,000

On HBO we were slaughtered by True Blood (5,003,000) but beat out every other series including Hung (3,617,000), Entourage (3,460,000), Big Love (2,320,000), Curb Your Enthusiasm (1,518,000) and Bored To Death which managed about a quarter as many viewers (948,000).

On Showtime Dexter had about three fifths of our audience (2,166,000) Weeds less than half (1,524,000), Nurse Jackie about a third (1,314,000), Californication less than a quarter (981,000), and The Tudors (779,000) and The L Word (642,000) less than that.

And yes we beat everything on TBS and SyFy as well.

So who ate our lunch? USA. Basically everything they put on kicked our asses. Burn Notice, (7,677,000), Royal Pains, (7,474,000) Monk, (6,259,000) White Collar (6,080,000) and even Criminal Intent, (4,447,000) gave us a whupin. And of course TNT’s own The Closer (which was our lead-in) continued to post huge numbers.

Hope that answers the questions. And as we say in the biz "that's a wrap."

Episodes 13, 14 and 15...

For those of you wanting to know how RTB turns out, you can find the last three episodes onlinehere.

This from Simple Justice

Hat tip to Simple Justice who had this nice post on the recent decision in People v. Radcliffe More on this soon...

Britain to Tax Banker Bonuses

I love the way they're doing this. We won't of course, but we should--a windfall profits tax is perfectly appropriate here. At least as long as we're not going to just chuck the whole system and adopt an APT tax which is what we should do.

Thinking about time...

In the wake of yesterday's news that RTB had been cancelled, I found myself thinking a lot about the whole arc of my life, (leaving The Bronx Defenders, writing Indefensible, going back and forth to Hollywood etc) and more specifically about time and doing time. It turns out there's a handy website that calculates the number of days between dates, allowing me to easily determine that there were 1,259 days from the day I got a phone call from Steven Bochco and we agreed to do a show, until its cancellation two seasons later. In the spirit of idiotic RENT songs, the website also informs me that: 3 years, 5 months and 10 days also converts to:

108,777,600 seconds
1,812,960 minutes
30,216 hours
179 weeks (rounded down)



But put another way, it's almost exactly a four year prison sentence with good time, or what the feds would describe as a 48 month guideline sentence.

I am sad to see the show fall by the wayside. There was so much more I thought the show had to say, and I really felt we continued to improve from a story and character standpoint. I suppose I was even naive enough to think that a third season would have offered us a critical reappraisal. But, as a friend of mine use to say, "at least no one calls me "old peg leg".