Ratings History and Reaction
Despite earning mixed reviews, Vanished had a strong series premiere. Many Prison Break fans kept the channel on Fox to see the new thriller. When the second episode premiered, overall audience share declined compared to the first week. However, the show actually increased its share of the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic.
The premiere managed to beat TV's two highest rated sitcoms, Two and a Half Men and The New Adventures of Old Christine, in total viewers.
However, in later weeks the ratings started to show a continued decline due to the strong performance of NBC's new series, Heroes, and returning shows featured in CBS's Monday-night comedy lineup. Although Fox continued to air the series in the U.S., the Global Television network in Canada cancelled the series after airing only five episodes.
Following a three-week hiatus due to the Major League Baseball playoffs, Fox moved Vanished to the Friday Night Death Slot, where only two further episodes were broadcast. The first of these nominally starred Gale Harold, who had been dramatically killed off on episode 7, following weeks of rumors and a storm of viewer protest on various websites. Though Harold appeared as a corpse for a few seconds, this was actually the first episode to feature the show's new leading man Eddie Cibrian. The ratings had plummeted, slicing viewership in half and dropping Vanished to last place in its time slot. The following week the show did even worse, earning only 0.9% of the most desirable 18-to-49-year-old demographic.
On November 15, 2006 Fox announced it was pulling the show for the rest of the November sweeps. The next day, Fox had not yet officially cancelled the series, but announced that the final four unaired episodes would be made available in the U.S. only on the show's official MySpace, according to Fox's website.
In Australia, the first two episodes aired back to back and rated 1.1 million mainland capital city viewers, making it the winner of its time-slot and the eighth most watched program for the night. The third episode's ratings dropped slightly to 998,000 viewers, but retained eighth position for the night. By the fourth episode, ratings dropped again to 809,000 viewers and dropped to fifteenth position for the night. The final episode of Vanished, which screened on March 5, 2007, got 278,000 viewers.
In the United Kingdom, all the Vanished episodes aired on Channel Five in a late-night Sunday slot, averaging roughly 500,000 viewers per episode.
Read more about this topic: List Of Politicians On Vanished
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