What a difference a year can make. Last fall, Spike TV's The Joe Schmo Show was being touted as the flagship show of the newly relaunched "First Network For Men." This summer, after opening to disappointing ratings in its Tuesdays at 10PM ET/PT time period, Spike TV has decided to move The Joe Schmo Show 2 to Mondays at 11:05PM ET/PT, following its popular WWE RAW wrestling program.
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While hard-core fans of the series will no doubt view the move to the non-primetime late-night timeslot with disappointment, Spike TV undoubtedly hopes that the presence of its highly-rated wrestling programming as a lead-in will help spark the program's disappointing ratings.
Debuting Tuesday, June 15, Joe Schmo 2 drew only 596,000 overall viewers for its premiere, a figure that was not only below the numbers drawn by last fall's premiere of the original Joe Schmo, but far below the 3.4 million viewers who tuned in for the program's October 2003 finale. At the time, analysts attributed Schmo 2's disappointing opening to a poor performance in the network's core male demographics (0.6/2 in Men 18-34 and 0.4/1 in Men 18-49) due to ABC's broadcast of the NBA Finals fifth and final game.
The next week's episode failed to do any better however, with the June 22 second episode only drawing 418,000 viewers, a frustrating 30% decline from the premiere's already low numbers.
Joe Schmo 2 will begin airing on Monday's at 11:05PM ET/PT with tonight's third episode.