TV Bulletin Board (Sept. 26)
09/26/07 15:06
By ED BARK
***The annual honor of being fall's first cancellation goes to Fox's Nashville, silenced after just two Friday night episodes.
The reality series will be replaced by repeats of the new and also struggling series K-Ville until major league baseball's postseason kicks in.
***Nielsen Media Research is making a significant change in its audience measurements by giving broadcast networks the option of a single, combined rating for series episodes that air twice within a single broadcast week. The commercials also have to be identical for each telecast.
Nielsen says that NBC's Heroes is the first series to "take advantage" of the "new processing option." Monday's second season premiere and this Saturday's repeat will be counted as one episode in Nielsen's national weekly ratings.
***New NBC entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman keeps ordering new series from Reveille, the company he founded in 2002. The latest is My Dad is Better Than Your Dad, a co-production of Reveille and reality maestro Mark Burnett (Survivor, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?).
Better Than Your Dad, with an eight-episode run earmarked for midseason, pits old man against old man in "a series of unique stunt-driven challenges," says NBC. The network's riotous vp of alternative programming, Craig Plestis, confidently predicts success because Reveille and Burnett are "the 'Big Daddies' of the reality genre."