In what has been for the most part a season to forget for NBC, the newest member of the “Law and Order” franshise is giving the peacock network something to hang its hat on.
The show was launched last week with back-to-back episodes Thursday and Friday.
With a nice lead-in from “The Apprentice,” Thursday night’s “Trial by Jury” premiered to an audience of 17.3 million viewers, slightly ahead of the season average for “ER” in the same time period.
Moving to the much slower Friday night, “Trial by Jury” still pulled in 14.4 million viewers, easily winning its time period.
That 4.1 rating, though, represented NBC’s best non-Olympic performance in the time period since Oct. 2003. However, the start is very similar to CBS’s Numb3ers, a show that began with large ratings but has been slipping of late.
The last “Law & Order” show to air original episodes on Friday was “Special Victims Unit,” which regularly delivered better than a 5.0 demographic rating between its 2000 premiere and its move to Tuesday nights.
Credit: Zap2It
