Michael wrote:
Thanks! Alias didn't do all that well at all for its two hour bow.
9 million? HMph.
You know what?
I expect the finale of ALIAS to match its season 4 premier, if not higher.
Think about it. It's going to follow the 2 hour LOST finale, which will surely have more viewers than the premiere of LOST.
It WON'T be going against American Idol and CSI: New York as well as Law and Order finished up their season this past week, so it will be the only fresh episode of anything there is to watch on TV.
As for the rest of the ALIAS season.... anyone have stats on how well ALIAS did in the first 3 seasons?
I mean how bad could it have done if people think 8 million vuewers is still apretty good improvement. Without a new LOSt (though granted it has American Idol to battle with) it garnered about 6-7 million viewers, which is pretty damn bad. I mean CSI and Without a Trace do phenomenal but even buzz-lost Apprentice and aged ER do around 13-14+ million viewers, sometimes up to 16-17 million against the CBS competitors.
American Idol does only around 24-25 million for Wednesday shows while CSI reahces 29 million alot fo times. When you're high up there, it may not seem as though 4 million is such a big difference. But think about adding a consistent 4 million to ALIAS' audience and you have an audience consistent with its 4th season premeiere boasting ABC 4th or 5th highest rated show.
Ultimately when all is said and done, I think Season 4 will have done a bit more damage than good. Not only did it alienate some core viewers but exposing ALIAS to such a large audience with the heavy promo and ads and then seeing it lose that audience more and more each week really told us that ALIAS is never gonna really catch on. If they found a better time slot and if it held on to a solid 9-10 million viewers next season, maybe even peaking at 11m sometimes, I'd say season 4 was worth it, but placing it in the 8pm thursday slot will doom it. So, not only did we find out that ALIAs will never be too big or mainstream, but in the process we lost some fans. The sad part is if they tsuck around or if alot of the January viewers stuck around to the end, they would have grown more attached to it because the second half of the season REALLY picked up quality wise (while looking back the first half did have some pretty great stand-alone episodes).
So, even though in retrospect I don't think ALIAS was bad at all in Season 4, it still wasn't better than the previous seasons.
Nothing will be better than Season 1 and 2 for original ALIAS fans because that's the show we fell in love with and no matter how good the maekovers are, it won't ever be the same.
I believe that the second half of Season 3 picked up alot quicker than Season 4 and also liked Lauren's character alot (it at least gave Vaughn something to do). Elena and Irina alone rejuvinated ALIAS in season 4 and that cannot be underappreciated.
We'll just have to see what Season 5 has ins tore, cuz there are so many characters in play now, the direction will be tricky and I SINCERELY hope they don't give the characters a Sark/Katya/Francie treatment in which they only appear on 1 or 2 episodes per following season.
I also hope the finale gets alot done. I will be pissed if the cliffhanger is about the destruction of the world or Russia and not about the family or something else about Rambaldi. Seriously, I hope they know what they're doing with this storyline in Russia cuz even for ALIAS it's starting to be borderline unbelievable if they mess it up and sloppy-ly handle it.
