T Dog’s Six Pack: The Valentine’s edition

The Grammy Awards: Most watched in 28 years.

It’s a Valentine’s edition of T Dog’s Six Pack – the heart-shaped winners and the prune-shaped losers:

A fine box of chocolates

The Grammys. Fueled by the death of Whitney Houston (who paid tribute) and Adele’s 6-for-6 night, the 54th Grammy Awards drew 40 million viewers, the second-largest audience for the awards show in history (The 1984 Grammys drew 43.8 million when Michael Jackson swept the awards with eight wins), and the best 18-49 demo numbers in 22 years. The Grammys also has seen a ratings increase for the fourth consecutive year, up a whopping 132 percent from 2008.

The Walking Dead. You can describe the rest of the competition on Grammy night as “The Walking Dead” (you can also apply the phrase to Fox’s Animation Domination block or the Chicago Blackhawks these days) , but not to the show which bears its name. Even against the highly rated Grammys, Walking Dead drew 8.1 million viewers and a 4.2 demo rating, beating out all broadcast networks’ programs (except the Grammys) that night.

The Big Bang Theory. The off-network run of the hot Warner Bros.’ sitcom tied CBS’ Judge Judy and Wheel of Fortune last week for top syndicated program last week with a 7.6 household rating. This comes on the heels of new episodes of Big bang outranking American Idol Thursday night head-to-head two weeks in a row. Bazinga!

A lousy box of prunes

The CW signs Bill Cunningham to do a talk show. The 64-year old conservative radio talk show host from Cincinnati just had his daytime TV talk show sold to The CW – a broadcast network whose target demo has no idea who he is. CW and Tribune Broadcasting are just rearranging deck chairs on the S.S. Minnow with both being run by people who should belong on Gilligan’s Island.

Chicago Tribune declares Ray Rayner dead. Again. Interesting obituary that was posted online at the Chicago Tribune’s website Monday regarding beloved Chicago children’s TV host Ray Rayner, who passed away at the age of 84. The only problem is, he died eight years ago. The obituary the Tribune ran was from 2004 and was accidentally listed as the four most viewed stories of the day. 

Twitter has a habit of declaring celebrities dead before they really die. The Tribune now declares celebrities dead – when they’re already dead. Tomorrow, look for the Tribune to announce the deaths of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney.

WLUP-FM, “The Loop”. With no live voices after about 8:30 am weekdays and none on weekends, this once-great rock outlet might as well be run from Lake Charles, La. But with the station surprisingly doing well in the ratings (after a controversial “format adjustment” i.e. Van Halen, Aerosmith, and Def Leppard songs ten more times per day), The Loop is nothing more than “radio for people who don’t care about radio”.

The phrase also explains how Khloe Kardashian and the Blackhawks’ Daniel Carcillo got their radio jobs.

 

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