TV Ratings 9/25/12: Neither of Fox’s new comedies repeat New Girl’s splash from last season

Last season, Fox’s New Girl exploded on its first outing. Its ratings even exceeded its lead-in Glee. The show faded over the course of its season, though, and ended with significantly lower ratings.

This year, Fox launched two new comedies with New Girl episodes as their lead-in. Neither repeated New Girl’s feat. They both lost audience on a Live + Same day basis.  But, if you read the bottom of this article, you'll see that this is not cut and dry.

Ben & Kate had the lower rating of the two new shows, but it faced the higher rated The Voice in its timeslot. Mindy Kiger’s show was up against much the lower rated New Normal, which has had a ratings decline with each episode.

The most interesting thing about the losses in audience—and you won’t probably read this on other sites—was that almost all of the loss was due to having fewer time-shifters. If you look at the "live-only" audiences, the shows did well vs. their lead-in.

Live A18-49 Rating: 

New Girl 8PM-- 1.72; Ben & Kate—1.73 

New Girl 9PM—2.01; The Mindy Project—1.96.

This goes to show that when people are talking about "audience retention" in their ratings analysis, they probably shouldn't be talking about ratings that include time-shifting.  If somebody didn't playback New Girl until 10PM and didn't even DVR The Mindy Project, the latter isn't likely to retain that audience.