21 May 2012

WDYTYA in review

The 12 episode series of the US version of Who Do You Think You Are wrapped up last Friday. How did it do?

The series averaged 5.4 million viewers. Reba McEntire got the most viewers. Her 7.6 million viewers was the greatest number for WDYTYA over all the series.

The fewest viewers were for the Edie Falco episode, 4.54 million. The episodes with Blair Underwood, Jerome Bettis, Rita Wilson, and Jason Sudekis all attracted fewer viewers than the least for any of the previous series which was Spike Lee's 5.21 million. That's indicative of why NBC decided to end the program's run.

Throughout this series I've been polling on the blog asking "Compared to other Who Do You Think You Are? episodes you've seen how do you rate the xxxx xxxxx episode?" The scale was from 1 meaning "Well above Average" to 5 meaning "Well below average." The highest rated by this genealogical elite was the Rita Wilson episode, the lowest Martin Sheen. All but three, Martin Sheen, Jerome Bettis and Paul Deen, rated better than 3.0 or "about average."

Episode                      Viewers           Blog rating
                                      (million)         (lower is better)
Martin Sheen                6.09                  3.29
Marisa Tomei                5.54                  2.82
Blair Underwood           4.99                  2.16
Reba McEntire               7.6                    2.43
Jerome Bettis                 5.05                  3.18
Helen Hunt                     5.57                  2.43
Rita Wilson                     5.01                  1.84
Edie Falco                       5.45                   2.52
Rob Lowe                        5.21                   2.43
Rashida Jones                 5.25                   2.03
Jason Sudeikis                4.76                   2.6
Paula Deen                      5.54                   3.07

1 comment:

Ellen Thorne Morris said...

Knowing that I can watch the show another day makes it easy to skip on a Friday night. Does anyone count the times we catch up on line? I find it easier to watch several shows at one time and make my own notes on new sources, etc.