A New Graveyard Shift for Network TV?

For cable hits like Jersey Shore and Pawn Stars, 10 p.m. is a golden hour for 18- to 49-year-old viewers, but for their rivals at the networks, viewers might as well be asleep.

The 10 p.m. time slot has become a nightly headache for TV networks, which have tried unsuccessfully for an evening hit for that time slot, longing for the days when shows like Hill Street Blues and L. A. Law had viewers sitting up in bed, riveted at that hour, reports the New York Times.

NBC, which infamously tried to place Jay Leno at 10 p.m. five nights a week, has placed the blame on digital video recorders, contending that its research suggests that viewers are using the 10 o’clock hour to play back material recorded earlier.

But, as the Times article points out, no such rewind urge seems to affect Jersey Shore, which has brought in about 6 million viewers each week this winter (not to mention the business deals accumulated by its young stars like Snooki) or Pawn Stars, with an audience that has hit 4 million. Other 10 p.m. cable hits such as The Game on BET, Teen Mom on MTV, Tosh.0 on Comedy Central and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on Bravo are also thriving with the 18-to-49 age group, and eight of the top 15 shows on cable television last week played in the 10 p.m. hour.

Recently published Nielsen ratings for the week of February 7, showed that NBC was absent on the list of top-rated shows on broadcast TV. The Grammy Awards on CBS led with 26.6 million viewers, followed by Fox’s American Idol with 24 million. Seven out of the remaining top 10 shows were on CBS, including Two and a Half Men, which went out with a bang as it aired its last in-the-can episode before the off-screen antics of its star Charlie Sheen lead to a temporary production hiatus.

Kelly Kahl, the chief scheduler for CBS, which has successfully skewed its 10 p.m. offerings to an older crowd with shows like Hawaii Five-0 and the new drama, Blue Bloods, has a theory about 10 p.m. He told the Times that cable networks have succeeded by finding networks weakest spots, “first during the summers and now at 10 p.m.”

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