The Hollywood Reporter: The week after Steve Carell made his exit on The Office, ratings dropped 17 percent, landing NBC in fourth place in the key 18-49 demo.
Fox was No. 1 in the demo (4.7) with American Idol, up 7 percent from Wednesday's show and up 6 percent in total viewers (20.8 million vs. 19.6 million). Bones was up 18 percent (3.3, 11.1 million).
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That's no good. I think the show will be great even without Carell so I want to see it carry on for a few more years.
And I agree with one of the posters on the site. Everybody I knew was out for Cinco De Mayo that night including myself. Hopefully it picks back up next week.
I love the office, but the most recent episode was hard to watch,
i didn't like it at all, everyone felt so fake. I hope this show survives though.
I expected a quality drop and maybe even a slight viewership drop, but not so quickly.
I think there's a possibility for those statistics to be a bit misleading. I don't know cause I haven't looked at previous ratings for the show, but I guarantee this isn't quite as big as a 17% drop from their normal/average rating.
The thing here is....of course it dropped. Everybody and their mother tuned in last week just because it was Steve Carell's last show. This event brought non-regulars out of the woodworks just to watch it. So obviously last week had a higher (possibly much higher) than normal rating. This could possibly be true for the several episodes before that as well since people knew these were Michael Scott's last episodes. Thus there was an increased spike in ratings. Now, when it drops back down to normal levels, it could give the illusion that the show has fallen off and lost many viewers.
And it appears I was right. This is a misleading stat. Is it a drop from the season's average? Yes. Is it as huge a drop as these stats imply? Not at all.
To put this in perspective a bit: This episode still scored higher ratings than Michael's Last Dundies. It also outscored the Todd Packer episode, along with the episode that Michael proposed to Holly, along with the Threat Level Midnight episode. And it tied the PDA episode. And there's a handful of others it outperformed from earlier this season.
So, out of the last 8 episodes, this episode ties for third (with 'PDA') in ratings. Being beaten only by Michael's last episode and Will Farrell's debut episode.
Furthermore, the Goodbye Michael episode had more viewers than any other episode this season except for the season premiere (way back in September).
So, as you can see, definitely some misleading stats. This isn't a bad sign at all. It's just that last week's episode was more than just an episode of The Office, it was an event. An event of that magnitude is always going to create increased (abnormal) spikes in ratings.