Nobody Loves You!

The numbers are in and they're about what we've come to expect from Zombie Simpsons here in latter part of the 08-09 season.  Last night's excruciating romantic comedy/morality tale thing was viewed by 6.40 million unfortunate people.  That's a slight decrease from last week and has pushed the season average below 7.5 million. 

Season 19 averaged 8.26 million viewers per episode; I'm hoping that this season ends up below 7.26 million viewers as that would make for an impressive sounding decrease of one million viewers from season to season.  There are somewhere between four and six episodes left, and if the next four episodes are watched by the same 6.4 million people as this one then the season average would fall to to 7.25 million.  

C'mon Zombie Simpsons, choke on your own mediocrity.  

Still Shitty

The numbers are in and while they're a mild improvement from last week they're still well below both the season average and where they were last year.  Last night's Sideshow Bob cameo popped for 6.58 million viewers, so the over has it.  

I would also like to point out that "Wedding for Disaster" is a pretty good example of pop culture references instead of pop culture jokes.  I'm not opposed to sending up the concept of psychotic brides to be, because it's a ridiculous concept and could use some satirizing.  Nor am I opposed to sending up the bridezillas themselves, because crazy people applying their narcissistic crazy to their wedding and everyone around them also deserve to have some fun poked at them.  But that's not what "Wedding for Disaster" did.  Instead it just has Marge acting nuts (and way way way out of character) in the context of a wedding.  They aren't satirizing anything, they're just having their characters act out an overly planned wedding.  

The same goes for the "Saw" thing.  Did it add anything to the episode?  Of course not, they just wanted to reference a string of popular movies.  It's not like the "Saw" franchise isn't crying out to be made fun of, they've made five movies in five years.  But Zombie Simpsons didn't make fun of them, they just used the "Saw" plot and visuals to inch their moronic plot along.  

Oh Yeah, It Was Bad

That was a fairly typical "Zombie Simpsons goes to X" type episode.  A few amusing one liners and cultural jokes are all but lost inside a thin husk of a story that doesn't make any sense and takes too long to tell.  The ratings are in and once again the numbers are bad, with a mere 6.15 million viewers tuning in.  That's up slightly from last week, though it's still well below average for this season and a million or so people down from the same period last year.  

Angry Yawns

That bizarro thing that was on last night distracted me enough that I forget to make an over/under prediction for this week's ratings.  Oh well, the under would've won because the numbers are in and once again they aren't pretty.  Just like last week, yesterday's Zombie Simpsons failed to make the totally arbitrary six million people number, coming in at 5.97 million people.   

To give you an idea of just how bad things are, through thirteen episodes of Season 19 (the lowest rated season ever), Zombie Simpsons was averaging a little over 9 million viewers.  Through thirteen episodes this year Zombie Simpsons is averaging 7.72 million viewers, a decrease of 15%.  What's more, the ratings tend to be lower in the spring than in the fall so that number is likely to go lower still.  March, April and May of last year dragged the overall average down from 9.07 to just 8.26 million viewers.  

In a related note, Family Guy Afterbirth (aka American Dad) pulled in 5.83 million viewers and actually had a better rating among 18-34 year olds than Zombie Simpsons did.  Sweet.  

And the Hits Keep on Coming

Last night's Flanders love-in was a near perfect microcosm of Zombie Simpsons crapitude: the Simpsons do something zany, Homer doesn't worry about it because he knows everything is going to be okay, everything turns out to be okay for some reason, the end.  Like much of Zombie Simpsons, there were a few chuckle worthy gags almost totally subsumed by the hurricane force torrents of "What the fuck?".

TV by the Numbers will have the ratings up in a few hours, in the meantime I'm setting the over/under at 7.1 million people.  There was no NASCAR preemption this week and it was the first time since November that new episodes have premiered on consecutive Sundays.  

Also, I have no idea why our main page here was blank for portions of yesterday, but it seems to be working now.  

Update:  Wow, 5.99 million, the under wins by a mile and my handicapping skills have been dealt another blow.  Zombie Simpsons got beat by the oxymoronically titled "Saturday Night Live Clips" on NBC.  The demographic numbers aren't as grim, especially among 18-34 year olds, but that's still a very sad number, the second worst of all time.  (The Josh Groban Power Hour holds that distinction.)  Still, it's always nice to get good news on a Monday.  

NASCAR Cannot Save You

TV by the Numbers has yesterday's ratings up and when I set the over/under at 6.5 million people I was almost dead on.  NASCAR ran long, so Zombie Simpsons couldn't crawl out of the dirt until after eight thirty.  At that time "Post Race/Simpsons" drew 6.713 million people, at 9:00 "Simpsons/King of the Hill" declined to 6.316.  That averages out to just over 6.5 million, but either number is hearteningly low, especially considering that NASCAR is a strong lead in, with 12.5 million people watching at 8:00pm.  Zombie Simpsons hasn't cracked 7 million people since November and the ratings are down about a million people from where they were at a similar time last year.  Excellent.