'Strange New World' Ratings Drop Slightly

See Also: 'Strange New World' Episode Guide

Facing stronger competition from the season premieres of Ed and Dawson's Creek, as well as baseball on Fox, ratings for yesterday's Enterprise episode again dropped slightly, but the largest audience drop seems to be over.

According to a report on Zap2It, 'Strange New World' achieved a 6.8 rating and a 10 share, down slightly from last week's 7.2/11. These figures mean that 6.8% of all households in America with television sets were watching the show, while 10% of those who were actually watching TV yesterday were tuned in to Enterprise.

Enterprise placed fourth in its timeslot, again down one place from last week. NBC won the timeslot with the season premiere of Ed, which scored a 9.0/14 - up dramatically from the finale of Lost last week, which only scored a 5.3. Other strong performers at 8:00pm were CBS's 60 Minutes II, scoring an 8.5/13, and two of ABC's comedies, which averaged a 7.3/11. Enterprise was still able to stay ahead of FOX's baseball program, which averaged a 6.3/10 and the season premiere of Dawson's Creek, which scored a 4.3/6.

If these results hold up in the final national ratings, Enterprise's audience drop-off between the second and the third episode is relatively consistent with the other modern Trek series. The show lost 5.5% of its audience for the second week, compared to 3% for Deep Space Nine and 4.5% for Voyager. The Next Generation, however, lost as much as 18% between 'The Naked Now' and 'Code of Honor.'

Overall, Enterprise's audience loss is still smaller than any of the three other series, as 'Strange New World' retained 75% of the audience that first tuned in for the premiere - this compares favourably to the 60% that were left for TNG's third episode, 68% for Voyager, and 69% for DS9. Following that, the ratings for DS9's and Voyager's first seasons continued to erode to less than half of their opening numbers, while TNG began to climb back after its fourth episode. The real test of Enterprise's strength will come over the coming season, as it becomes clear whether the show's ratings continue to fall or whether it will be able to build on them.

Meanwhile, Special Unit 2 continued to turn in disappointing ratings. The second episode of the show's sophomore year took in a 3.5/5, down 12.5% from last week. It placed sixth in its timeslot, and was the worst-performing network show of the entire night. Especially with a strong lead-in such as Enterprise, this is a very poor performance for the show, and UPN will likely not be too happy with its loss of nearly half of the Enterprise audience.

Another UPN show that failed to retain enough of its lead-in audience was Roswell, which aired its third-season premiere two days ago. The show attracted 3.87 million viewers, which was more than for its season debut on the WB last year and more than UPN's Tuesday night movie used to attract, but it still lost 30% of the viewers who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer an hour earlier. Buffy itself, however, continued to do well, attracting 5.58 million viewers and thereby doubling last year's Tuesday night averages on UPN.

Final ratings and viewership numbers for 'Strange New World' should be available tomorrow. Please note that the Enterprise ratings above represent the so-called 'overnight ratings' from the 47 television markets in the country. The final ratings measure all the markets in the country, and provide more detailed demographic info. As Star Trek tends to be most popular in large urban markets, its final ratings are usually a bit lower than the overnight ratings - 'Fight or Flight,' for instance, dropped from a 7.2 to a 5.7.

For yesterday's full ratings report, please follow this link to Zap2It.

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