In a transparent quest for additional viewers, NBC-Universal has announced that beginning Tuesday, October 14 its CNBC business news cable channel, already benefiting from its twice-weekly repeats of NBC's current The Apprentice 2 broadcasts, will also begin broadcasting weekly telecasts of the Blow Out hair salon startup series that aired on the media conglomerate's Bravo network earlier this summer.
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Episodes of the six-episode Blow Out will air weekly on Thursday evenings at both 8PM and 11PM ET/PT beginning October 14. The unscripted series, produced by the non-Mark Burnett half of the production team behind NBC's earlier The Restaurant restaurant startup series, followed hairstylist Jonathan Antin in his quest to establish a new salon in chic Beverly Hills and become a prominent player in an already incredibly competitive marketplace.
While it's questionable whether Blow Out (or Apprentice for that matter) feature enough practical business content to merit broadcast on a business news network, the show did prove quite popular with Bravo's upscale-leaning audience (a higher-income demographic presumably not unlike that of CNBC) during its run and drew over one million viewers for its July 2004 finale.
The numbers might seem small for those used to reading network viewership figures, but in a cable world where even top-ranked basic cable shows such as MTV's The Real World only draw 3-4 million viewers weekly, Blow Out's numbers were significant for a second-tier basic cable network such as Bravo. Throughout its six episode run, Blow Out averaged 588,000 Adult 25-54 viewers and 578,000 Adults 18-49. The figures represented a 79% increase in Adults 25-54 and a 99% jump in Adults 18-49 compared to Bravo's Tuesday 9PM time period performance over the same dates last year.
Negotiations for a second Blow Out season were reported to be underway earlier this summer (with Jonathan rumored to be making additional demands in order to secure his participation), however to date Bravo has not yet announced any plans for additional episodes. Perhaps they had second thoughts after seeing what happened with the second season of NBC's The Restaurant.