Wednesday 01/04/12- ABC Originals Beat its Weaker Competition, ESPN Bowls Roll Along

Returning from a four-week hiatus, ABC rolled out originals of its entire Wednesday night lineup, making the network the top choice of A18-49 television viewers. While the network's first two comedies, The Middle (2.33 A18-49 Live Rating) and Suburgatory (2.41) experienced slight improvement over the prior originals, the 9pm hour of Modern Family (3.80) and Happy Endings (2.53) reported 12% viewership increases with A18-49. Placing first in the 10pm hour, ABC's freshman drama Revenge (1.99) also displayed slight growth.

Shifting to the cable landscape, ESPN continued its college football coverage with the 2012 Orange Bowl (2.33), featuring the #23 West Virginia Mountaineers and #15 Clemson Tigers, which pushed the network to second place among A18-49 viewers. However, as West Virginia set a bowl scoring record with their high-powered offense, the one-sided game was not as enticing with viewers, as the telecast reported a 32% decline with A18-49 from last year's matchup between the #4 Stanford Cardinal and #13 Virginia Tech Hokies.

Opening its evening with a special airing of I Get That A Lot (2.08), which showed significant improvement over the show's half-hour airing on 12/17/10, CBS landed second among the broadcast networks but third overall among A18-49, as the network completed the evening with repeats of Criminal Minds (1.88) and CSI (1.66).

FOX employed the opposite philosophy last night, as it kicked off the night with an 8pm repeat airing of Glee (0.72), followed by a special episode of Mobbed (1.13), which reported a significant decline among A18-49 from its previous special on 11/23/11.

Choosing not to compete with original programming last night, NBC landed fourth among its broadcast competition with an all-repeat lineup of Up All Night (0.93), Whitney (0.89), Harry's Law (0.70) and Law & Order: SVU (1.05), while The CW continued to air back-to-back encores of The Secret Circle at 8pm (0.29) and 9pm (0.27), keeping the network in a distant last place with A18-49 viewers.

Source: Nielsen, based on Live data