TV News: ‘Person of Interest,’ ‘Charlie’s Angels’ Have Decent Premiere Ratings, ‘The Office’ Maintains

CHICAGO – The overnights for the first new Thursday of the Fall 2011 season are in and there were no major surprises. Every network has something to be happy about and something to worry about, depending on who’s spinning the story. “The X Factor” maintained from its opening night numbers and “The Office” proved it may not need Steve Carell, while “Person of Interest [19]” and “Charlie’s Angels” were well-sampled.

Person of Interest Photo credit: CBS

CBS is still the major ratings story and they had the strongest night across the board. They opened with the #1 show of the night in household ratings as Emmy-winner “The Big Bang Theory” brought in a 9.6 rating, UP from last year’s 9.2 ratiing. It was the only show on the night that was in the same time slot that was up year-to-year. Anyone else feel like “TBBT” is going to be on for a decade?

J.J. Abrams’ “Person of Interest” had a healthy-if-not-spectacular opening, drawing an 8.6 rating. It’s a good number for most networks but it should be noted that it was down from the 9.6 notched by the season premiere of “C.S.I.” last year. “The Mentalist” was also down (16%) but still respectable with an 8.6 opening rating.

Last year, ABC opened Thursday nights with “My Generation” and its initial 3.9 rating was almost legendary the next morning. It was quickly canceled. “Charlie’s Angels” performed much better, drawing a 6.1 rating, but that’s still only good enough for 3rd place. Yes, ABC is in enough trouble that 3rd place might be OK for awhile. “Grey’s Anatomy” was down 23% from last year with a 7.7 rating.

On FOX, “The X Factor” notched an 8.3 rating, down 5% from Wednesday night. Not great. Not bad. Although certainly an improvement over the numbers notched by “Bones” and “Fringe” in this slot last year.

Finally, there’s NBC. All the critical acclaim in the world isn’t going to get people to watch “Community [20]” and “Parks and Recreation [21].” which notched a 2.8 and a 3.0, respectively, although both shows are much stronger in the 18-49 demos that advertisers covet than in overall ratings. Interestingly, people didn’t care much about the departure of Steve Carell (or were curious to see how it would be handled) as “The Office” opened right near last year’s premiere numbers at a 5.4 rating. An impressive number of people stuck around for both “Whitney [22]” (5.0) and “Prime Suspect [23]” (4.6) — two shows that have to be considered strong openers, although arguably wouldn’t be on any network but ratings-challenged NBC. The story with these two will be in the second-week drops. Stay tuned.

[24]	By BRIAN TALLERICO [25] Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com [24]