Following a 30 Rock première that [spoiler alert, in case you haven’t watched the episode, like most Nielsen households] involves Jack Donaghy purposefully sandbagging NBC’s programming schedule, a news update about the episode’s ratings pretty much writes itself. “Maybe they should’ve put it at 9 with God Cop as a lead-in” the 3.4 million wiseacres who actually did watch “The Beginning Of The End” presumably thought upon reading about the episode’s unfortunate, undeserved, but nonetheless unsurprising 1.3 rating among adults 18 to 49. “Talk about ‘tanking it,’” they continued, pleased with a solid start to the show’s final season that nonetheless drew an audience 24 percent smaller than Community’s performance in the same timeslot last year. “How long has this been going on? Seven years? Eight?” the theoretical spew of references concluded, noting that this is nothing new for the series, particularly since CBS—whose shows won every time period for the night, with The Big Bang Theory’s 15.4 million viewers and 4.9 rating in the target demo walloping Last Resort (7.9 million viewers, 1.8 18-49) as well as 30 Rock at 8 p.m.—starting dogpiling on NBC’s lower-rated, cultishly adored Thursday-night lineup. Letting out one last “Nerds!” for old time’s sake, everyone returned to their workday and a world where you can buy a “Bazinga!” T-shirt in the souvenir shops of any major U.S. city, while “Blerg!”-based outerwear remains the province of crowd-sourced online peddlers.
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