The Ratings
There has been some erroneous reporting of low rating figures for the U.S. showing of the documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” on Discovery Sunday night. It showed last night in Israel and tonight in Canada, not sure when it is scheduled on Channel 4 the UK. Anyway, just for the record here are the numbers from official sources as reported by Variety under the headlined story: ‘
Jesus’ raises Discovery
‘Tomb’ boon for cabler USA net tops in basic cable
The overall rating for the show was 3.21 or 4.1 million people. The late night encore drew another 796, 000
The rating for the Koppel show afterwards was 2.1, holding on to 2/3 of the audience
This is triple the normal ratings for Discovery programs at that slot.
Discovery also scored some of its best numbers ever with the special among adults 25-54 (its demo target), with 2.2 million, and 18-49, with 2.08 million.
Interesting sidelight: Charlotte pulled a 5.84 (which is unprecedented) while Portland, Minneapolis, Denver, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Columbus, Greenville, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City and Providence were all over 4s.
Cable TV networks such as Discovery, The Learning Channel, and The History Channel normally have a tiny share of the market (1% or less), nothing close to the major networks.
Just for comparison, three of the most popular shows today:
ABC Grey’s Anatomy 5.5
Fox American Idol 6.0 to 8.0
ABC Academy Awards 6.1
Needless to say the Discovery folk are extremely pleased and it has exceeded anything they were expecting. There was an organized boycott of millions of fundamentalist Christians who put on a last minute campaign to flood the station with e-mails and phone calls that reached close to a million. They were told by their pastors to tune in to rival channels during the three hour time slot, even if they just left the TV running, to help crash the numbers for Discovery. Since these ratings are not based on anyone who has their TV on it probably was a wasted effort.