At least the first day numbers from September 17 weren't too encouraging. Deadline Hollywood reports that all seven Scripps stations which replaced the Big Two syndie game shows saw huge ratings drops in the affected time periods of 31%-67%. Meanwhile, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune prospered on the first day of their new seasons. They got very nice increases in ratings compared to their year-ago numbers and their lead-in shows, despite losing the seven Scripps outlets.
Of course, other stations in all the affected markets picked up the Big Two shows. So folks in those cities could watch Pat and Vanna and Alex as usual. I really don't know how successful the Scripps experiment in cheaper homegrown programming will be. But the early returns don't look good.
UPDATE: To give Let's Ask America some credit, Variety has some better news for the show. In its first two weeks, the survey-fest averaged 1.7 and 1.8 household ratings in its markets. Hardly monster numbers but reasonably acceptable for such a low-cost show. Let's Ask America also skewed relatively young for a traditional game show.
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