Last Saturday night, the ABC show, “Nothing Sacred,” broke its own record for drawing the least number of viewers. The show scored 3.0 in the ratings when aired at 9:00 p.m., EST. As the New York Post put it, “That’s worse than many of the series on mini-networks WB and UPN—which is why industry insiders yesterday were buzzing that ABC will pull the priest drama from the lineup as soon as this week.”
Catholic League president William Donohue issued the following remarks today:
“This is not a good week for the corporate boys at Disney/ABC. First they learned that ABC made TV history when it fell to fourth place in the Sweeps ratings, finishing behind FOX. Now they learn that all the cash they’ve spent hyping ‘Nothing’ was money down the toilet.
“The handwriting has been on the wall from last September, but the politically brazen writers, producers and directors of ‘Nothing’ refuse to listen to the voice of grassroots Catholics. However, they can’t buck the market and that’s the beauty of a democracy.
“The apologists for ‘Nothing’ have said for months that the reason the show is a bomb is because it is forced to compete with NBC’s star-studded Thursday night lineup. So ABC switched the show to Saturday night. When that didn’t work, actor Kevin Anderson complained that too many people were ‘frying eggs’ at 8:00 p.m. So ABC switched the show to 9:00 p.m. And now the show has broken its own lousy record, making the Nielsen auditors wonder if the only Catholics left watching the show are those too comatose to know what they’re watching.
“Maybe they should put the show on at 3:00 a.m., that way they wouldn’t have to fight the competition or worry about people flipping eggs. But it seems their minds are too scrambled to figure that one out.”
