At NBC, the Thrill Is Gone Along With the Audience

By BILL CARTER

NBC got its first taste of the difference between the Olympics and anything else it can offer in prime time: its audience Monday night dropped about 25 million from the network’s Olympic highs.
And if anyone deserved a ratings gold medal on the night, it was the chef Gordon Ramsay on Fox. With none of the Olympic hype, Mr. Ramsay’s two reality shows beat NBC from 8 to 10 p.m., with his returning series, “Hell’s Kitchen,” the dominant show of the night.

In isolation, without any expected halo from the Olympics, NBC’s performance would have been considered respectable, especially for its 10 p.m. drama “Grimm.” That drama returned for its second season — riding a crest of promotions in the Olympics — with its second-highest rating ever in the audience category NBC sells to most of its advertisers, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49.
That was hardly a huge number, a 2.0 rating, but it would generally rank as a solid performance for a drama at 10 p.m. on an August night. “Grimm” averaged about 5.7 million viewers, which was the second-best total for the night.

Less impressive was the showing of a new reality series heavily pumped during the Olympic coverage: “Stars Earn Stripes.” The show managed to beat the weak “Bachelor Pad” on ABC and repeats on CBS, but Mr. Ramsay’s new series, “Hotel Hell” — which didn’t benefit from 17 days of exposure to 30 million viewers a night — decisively topped NBC’s military-inspired  competition series.

“Hotel Hell” scored a 1.9 in the 18-49 ratings to a 1.7 in that hour for “Stars Earn Stripes.”
Mr. Ramsay kicked into high gear against the second hour of the NBC bombs and guns show. His “Hell’s Kitchen” scored the night’s best 2.7 from 9 to 10, far above the 1.7 NBC scored in that hour.
Over all, the non-Olympics programming on NBC was beaten by Fox by 28 percent.