30 Rock ended on a high(ish) note last night, ratings-wise. The hour-long series finale was watched by 4.8 million viewers, its best ratings in two years. During her acceptance speech at the SAG Awards Sunday night, Fey jokingly pleaded with the audience, "Our finale is on this Thursday at 8 PM, up against The Big Bang Theory, so just tape The Big Bang Theory for once, for crying out loud!" At least a couple people listened to her, but the show was still handily beat by competition on CBS and Fox, coming in at third place. At 8pm, Big Bang won the night with 17.51 million and 5.3 in the key 18-49 demo, [...]
The Hollywood Reporter brought together showrunners Carter Bays (How I Met Your Mother), Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory), Liz Meriwether (New Girl), Paul Lieberstein (The Office), Steve Levitan (Modern Family), and Emily Spivey (Up All Night) to have a roundtable discussion. (Though, the gang actually shared three roundtables. Also, for some reason they were arranged by who did or did not wear glasses.) They address all the many stresses of the job, like deciding on pen color:
Liz Meriwether: I was unprepared for the leadership; people are looking to you for everything, and you’re pretending to be an expert on, say, props. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I haven’t had a baby.
[...]Parks & Rec dropped 11% to a series low in the ratings last night, while 30 Rock stayed low from last week. Meanwhile The Big Bang Theory is beating American Idol with around 16 million viewers, so…that's happening.
Gather round the ol' browser for last night's ratings, y'all. NBC comedies didn't do so hot on the whole, with Community at a particularly low 3.37 million viewers, down 17% from last week. Don't worry, though, The Big Bang Theory had 13.63 million.
Open Mind is a weekly series in which Josh Kurp takes a look at shows that we wouldn’t normally cover, to see whether they're as bad (or occasionally, as good) as people say. This week: The Big Bang Theory.
My father once complained that he didn’t like Seinfeld because he said it seemed like all the characters, particularly Jerry, knew they were telling jokes and were too self-satisfied with themselves after the punch line landed. I, of course, called bullshit on this, and probably went and watched “The Betrayal” in protest.
Except now, I feel that way about a character on another widely popular, well received sitcom: Jim [...]
