"Day Break" Premiere Stumbles

No one had expected the new Taye Diggs series "Day Break" on ABC to exceed "Lost" nor achieve the same numbers as its inflated lead-in, the season finale of "Dancing with the Stars" (27,22 million, most-watched program of the evening, possibly the second most-watched program of the week). But the suspenseful drama, whose plot twist some critics have branded 'exhausting', did much worse than the TV ratings analysts had predicted.

"Day Break" began at 9pm keeping about half the "Dancing" audience (just under 14 million). Then it all fell apart, as the two-hour premiere proved too much to bear. Every half hour the series was losing viewers ending up with a little over 8,5 million by 10:30pm. That is a loss of over 5 and a half million people in one evening. It took "Studio 60" a month to do the same.

Over on NBC, supernatural drama "Medium" starring Patricia Arquette opened its third season with about 9,5 million viewers. Although these numbers are somewhat off as opposed to the TV drama's performance on Mondays at 10pm, the show did remain stable during its two-hour episode (it even added a few hundred thousand people in the course of the evening), plus it grew out of lead-in "The Biggest Loser" by 50%.

Elsewhere, CBS' hiatus-headed "Jericho" did slightly worse than its season-average (9,41 viewers), while the rest of the line-up (Criminal Minds, CSI:NY) won its timeslot. Over on FOX, a repeat of "Bones" at 9pm (5,74 mil) did much better than "The O.C.", so expect the teen-drama to remain on Thursday nights, where the TV network hopes it might grow as "Grey's" and "CSI" head into December reruns.

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