Subj : Re: Rome
To   : alt.tv.farscape
From : RR
Date : Thu Sep 01 2005 16:11:40

From Newsgroup: alt.tv.farscape

'Rome': Veni; Audience: Vidi; Results: No Vici

Seeming to invoke the proverbial admonition that Rome wasn't built in a day,
executives of HBO dismissed analysts' observations that the 3.8 million
viewers who tuned into the first episode of Rome Sunday fell far short of
the numbers for other recent HBO series premieres. What counts, they
indicated, will be the total number that the installment draws as it repeats
over seven days on HBO's various digital channels. It is also available 24
hours a day on HBO's video-on-demand service. While the audience was roughly
a third of that drawn by HBO's The Sopranos, a spokesman for the pay-TV
channel remarked, "You can't compare it to The Sopranos. The two are
completely different shows." The initial broadcast of Rome on Sunday also
faced strong competition from MTV's Video Music Awards, which drew 8 million
viewers. (Indeed, the VMAs may have been harmed more by Rome than vice
versa; last year they drew 10.3 million viewers.) Fox News drew 4 million
viewers for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday, while CNN drew 2.3
million.

[Translation: "You'll pay to see what you never had any desire to stomach."]

-- 
RR

"It's been my experience that every
  time I think I know 'where it's at,'
      it's really somewhere else."
      - William Holden - S.O.B.

.