CBS moving ‘Harper’s Island’ to Saturday
Jim Beaver
Kiss of death? CBS paints the move of the mystery series as a good thing, in recognition of its appeal outside mainstream prime time. “Harper’s Island” draws an unusually large audience of people who record it using DVRs and also a large number who watch it streamed on CBS.com. (Numbers follow.) The online component that accompanies the series is setting records, the network adds.
The move comes as of Saturday. A “Criminal Minds” repeat will fill the 9 p.m. Thursday time slot this week.
By the way, Jim Beaver, who plays Sheriff Mills, broke the news of the move Monday on his Facebook page! I’ve been a fan of his ever since “Deadwood,” where he played noble Ellsworth, who stepped up to marry pregnant Alma Garrett.
Here’s the full “Harper’s Island” announcement from CBS.
HARPER’S ISLAND, the 13-week mystery event, will move to Saturday effective May 2 (9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) forming a two-hour block of original programming with 48 HOURS MYSTERY (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT). The move to Saturday comes on the heels of the first extended DVR playback data for the HARPER’S ISLAND premiere on April 9, as well as strong online viewer engagement.
“The preliminary DVR and online streaming data suggest a passionate audience for HARPER’S outside its current Thursday time period borders,” said Kelly Kahl, Senior Executive Vice President Prime Time, CBS Television. “This move gives us an opportunity to improve the time period on Thursday while experimenting with more original programming on Saturday, and continuing to serve an audience that is clearly engaged in the ongoing HARPER’S ISLAND story.”
According to Nielsen live plus 7-day playback results versus live, the HARPER’S ISLAND premiere audience increased by +29% in adults 18-49 (3.1 from 2.4), +33% in adults 18-34 (2.0 from 1.5), +25% in adults 25-54 (4.0 from 3.2) and gained +1.64 million viewers (11.29m from 9.65m).
The premiere of HARPER’S ISLAND was also CBS.com’s biggest online premiere ever, delivering more video streams (combined clips and episodes) than any previous show launch for the CBS Audience Network, and continues to be the fastest growing series in CBS.com’s history.
Anything that moves to Saturday to be replaced by reruns is toast.
Well it never was going to go beyond 13 episodes anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter much at this point. I don’t think the 13 week concept is necessarily a bad one, but this particular show is like a Friday the 13th movie for 20 somethings.
Apparently freeing up the Thursday time slot will also help CBS with the last minute scrambling they have to do thanks to yet another Presidential speech this Wednesday. They should just move all political speeches to Saturdays.
Ha! “experimenting with more original programming on Saturday” That’s hilarious. Talk about spin! I wonder if we’ll even see all of the episodes. Look what happened to “Kings.”