Weekly Update – Eleventh Hour gets five; Knight Rider loses five; Caprica Goes to Series; Reaper Returns; Ratings Update

Eleventh Hour Gets Four More Episodes: CBS has announced an order of five more episodes for the Jerry Bruckheimer produced series The Eleventh Hour. The show has performed quite well in total viewers this season averaging close to twelve million per week and coming in just behind bonafide hit The Mentalist in shows of interest to Science Fiction and Fantasy fans. However, it has continually lost as much as fifty percent of its lead-in audience from CSI which seems to have CBS executives a bit irked. Apparently it will be given five more outings in the same timeslot (which will begin airing in Spring after its winter hiatus), before the network makes a final decision on its fate. After those five episodes, new series Harper’s Island will take over its timeslot for the remainder of the season (and may be of some interest to genre fans with its horror elements).

NBC Cuts Knight Rider Order: This revival series which has seen its ratings spiraling down has received more bad news that its back-nine order of episode has been cut to four. NBC had given the series a full season order despite its poor numbers but had also announced a retooling that would move away from the espionage aspects it has focused on so far and closer to the feel of the original series. Apparently we will only see four episodes of the make-over version though as NBC seems to have lost faith in it. The last four episodes will begin airing in February after the show’s winter break, and it seems unlikely at this point that the show will see life beyond that.

Caprica Gets Series Order: The Sci Fi channel has given a series order to its Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica. After seeing the completed pilot, networks felt strong enough about the project to greenlight a series. The series is scheduled to bow in 2010 and there is no word on whether they will air the completed pilot prior to that (it was previously scheduled to air this month).

Reaper Return Date: The CW has announced March 17th as the date that devilish series Reaper returns to the schedule for its second season. It will air in the already crowded timeslot of Tuesdays at 9 PM. Currently CBS’s The Mentalist and FOX’s Fringe duke it out during that hour for genre fans, and The Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka is scheduled to return to that slot in Spring with the back half of its third season. Reaper, which just barely received a renewal for a second season, could find itself squeezed out by the competition. In any case, DVR’s will be quite busy during that hour.

Ratings Update: There were few surprises from this past week’s ratings as most shows prepare for their winter hibernation. Heroes continues to hold steady having fended off viewer attrition for a second week. Fringe seems to be losing some ground to The Mentalist as this past week the CBS procedural beat it in the 18-49 demographic. Previously Fringe had regularly won with the younger demographic while The Mentalist won in total viewers, but now the latter holds honors in both. Not certain if viewers started to lose patience with the Abrams series as it wrapped up its fall episodes, but I found the series much more interesting in recent weeks than during its early episodes. CBS’s The Eleventh Hour continues to see a slight erosion of viewers, especially in the younger demographic, which may have influenced the network’s decision to give it only a five episode back-half order instead of nine. Keep up with the weekly ratings with our Network Ratings Tracker as well as the likelihood of cancellation with the Renew/Cancel Index at TV by Numbers.