After a slight boost in live viewership in its first post-Stargate airing last week (story), Sanctuary headed back south in the ratings on Monday. “Normandy” drew an estimated 656,000 viewers to Syfy Channel (Live + Same Day), according to TVBytheNumbers.
The seventeenth episode of the show’s third season drew a 0.2 rating in the Adults 18-49 demographic, down a tenth from last week.
This is a painful drop of nearly 20 percent in viewers, and the least-watched episode in series history.
The show wasn’t competing with Dancing With the Stars‘s monster, 22-million viewer win for the final performance show on ABC (8 p.m.). Instead, its biggest network competition at 10 p.m. was the second hour of The Bachelorette, which turned in an average of 9 million viewers from 9 to 11 p.m. But it is NBA playoff season: the Mavericks/Thunder game on Monday night drew 7.41 million viewers to ESPN, leading all of cable for the night.
| EPISODE (air date) | VIEWERS (million) | CHANGE |
| Pax Romana (Apr. 15) | 1.217 | |
| Hangover (Apr. 22) | 1.424 | + 17% |
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Move to Monday
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||
| One Night (Apr. 25) | 0.868 | – 39% |
| Metamorphosis (May 2) | 0.838 | – 3% |
| Wingman (May 9) | 0.756 | – 10% |
| Awakening (May 16) | 0.815 | + 8% |
| Normandy (May 23) | 0.656 | – 20% |
WWE Smackdown led the cable ratings last Friday, May 23, with 2.889 million viewers over two hours.
This led into another installment of Urban Legends, which rebounded almost 30 percent to 1.236 million viewers. Though it bested former Friday time slot occupant Sanctuary by 88 percent this week, Urban Legends only managed a 0.3 rating — one tenth of a point higher in the key demographic.
Three episodes remain for Sanctuary‘s third season, airing Mondays at 10/9c on Syfy. “Carentan” will air on June 6, following a break in new episodes for the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
The show is currently in production on Season Four, which is expected to bow in the fall — hopefully back on Friday nights.
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SciFi Stream! Just visit the Sanctuary Season Three episode guide.
i actually quite enjoyed that episode.
i hope syfy moves the show back to friday. (((sanctuary)))
Gotta say that I loved this episode. My favorite episode this season so far (last week’s was good too though) very well-done, almost felt like watching an episode of Band of Brothers, rather than that terrible episode of Star Trek Enterprise where Archer went back in time to WWII. Loved the whole look/feel of the ep and from the title of next week’s episode I have a feeling that we might get another period piece. I think what we have to take from this is instead of looking at ratings on a week-to-week basis we should look at an overall… Read more »
I HOPE SYFY GOES UNDER. THAT’S WHAT THEY DESERVE FOR TREATING LOYAL FANS LIKE GARBAGE AND PANDERING TO REDNECKS.
Well I think we can say for certain, Syfy experiment of showing original material on Mondays have been a complete and utter flop. An there no hiding from this one. Even SGU did consistently better in this time slot than Sanctuary is doing. Syfy need to change there strategy and some new management at the top. An I think us fans need to keep applying pressure to Syfy management.
Only Idiots get things wrong twice. First with Universe than Sanctuary now, can’t they see that the only thing they are doing is hurting the show? Even when and if Sanctuary gets back into Friday, it will certainly loose credibility with those that pay to announce adds in the intervals of the shows.
Well I think we can say for certain, the Syfy experiment of showing original material on Mondays has been a complete and utter failure. And there’s no hiding from this one. Even SGU did consistently better in this time slot than Sanctuary is doing. Syfy needs to change their strategy and try some new management at the top. And I think we fans need to keep applying pressure on the Syfy management.
syfy needs to make room for moved stuff from other comcast / nbc networks and next year round 1 of the NHL.
Welcome to trying to run a genre show against monsters like Dancing With the Stars… SyFy really needs to write off this experiment with moving genre shows to the fall and trying to compete with long-established shows with a massive audience appeal as a bad idea and move the genre shows back to summer/winter where they will do wonderfully… Anyone want to start a petition to bring back a 5-hour block of SciFi Friday with Warehouse 13, Eureka, Sanctuary, Blood and Chrome and a new Stargate show?
Woohoo! Finally some good news!
Jeffknight- they have already emphaticly said “no way in hell, to ANY of that… they are now blocking people on Facebook and Twitter asking for them to bring stuff back, and told their fans to go “bugger off” – theres a reason for the boycott that goes far beyond them hurting shows like this.
please move this back to fridays take off the wrestling put it on another night.
Great just great, syfy is killing another show with this monday experiment! OR the Boycott of syfy is being followed through with action from fans .
BOYCOTT syfy
I had an idea earlier that i know is unrelated to this article but, if an sgu movie isnot going to happen what about a SG-ALL STARS movie that could include sg1 and a few from atlantis rescuing the sgu crew therefore killing 3 birds with one stone 1.SGU conclusion 2. SG1 movie 3. Atlantis movie all in one shot. saving mgm money and pleasing fans.
I think this proves someone needs to get fired at Syfy. With both SGU and Caprica i think they had shows that could have been very profitable for the network. Maybe not wrestling profitable, but could have turned a profit and made great television. Instead they decided to try scheduling decisions that easily killed both shows. Now i don’t think either show was ever going to be more then a niche hit. I doubt they would have even gotten to BSG levels of popularity. But they would have turned a nice little profit and made the core SciFi audience happy… Read more »
@kook916: the SGU movie idea the producers were working on was an “all-stars” movie. MGM has stated they don’t want to do anything more with Stargate, and would rather make money off of Bond 23 and their Viking show.
kook916, Jeffknight, ekras all have valid points. with all shows taking a dive in the ratings hopefully SYFI will re-analyze their cancellation decision of SGU. Additionally, having the entire library streaming on SYFI’s webcite, (while charging a low-cost membership to help fund the shows); supplimented by non-skipable advertisments (If we want our shows, it’s a give and take) would boost ratings, revenue, and increase the accuracy of the ‘ratings’ survey by including DVR’s, Live internet Streaming, and post-air streaming on SYFI’s webcite. Last, one inprovement for gateworld’s IT and moderators would be to add a function to comment on others’… Read more »
Seeing those low ratings only fuels my frustration for Syfy, and breaks my heart for the show. I’m disgusted that Syfy would do that to Sanctuary, how they’d ruin the show, only to help another show that did way worse. Syfy is not only hurting the shows reputation, but the cast and crew, and us fans. I hope Syfy knows what they did was wrong, and I hope they move the show back home in S4, or else there will be no S5. What Syfy is doing is beyond insulting and disgusting. Amanda came off at GttS as not to… Read more »
I don’t think its the Monday/Tuesday night slot so much as its the Monday/Tuesday night slot in the fall/spring. I bet if they aired it on mon. or tues. in the summer/winter the story would be different.
Perhaps Stargate fans have more of an influence than we thought? Are we stopping our Syfy tune in and causing their ratings to go down? If so, GOOD!
Syfy just wan’t to kill things all stargate related, boo to syfy.
Again, not relevant Stargate news!
Sanctuary is probably costing them too much in comparison with reality shows and the freshman spooky dramas they have been going with to cash in on the Twilight craze…Monday seems to be the scuttle day for SyFy shows.
Sanctuary never did it for me, but for the fans of the show I hope you get your wish of more seasons.
SyFy Channel is dying a slow painful death, and it’s all their own fault.
The likely out come of this will be that no one at all will approach them to air their shows.
Boycotting SYFY will not show them it will just make you lose all of your show never to return. So what can you do support your show so that way when they get cancel another network will pick them up. What cancel SGU is that it cost to much to make that is one of the main reason Syfy never pick up Firefly when it was offered to them. If SGU did not cost so much they would have renew it looking at the rating. I think the reason they put Sanctuary on Monday was to get a feel of… Read more »
hold on let me act surprised…..Wow, you mean saving a shows rating by moving it to Monday’s is not a GREAT idea???? I am boycotting SCFI and laugh when I scan through my Chanels and skip over the monster crock marathon on SyFy..or when the Syfy Facebook page posts lame new shows or attempts to draw fans back…I do not care if the channel fails or switches to “reality only” they do not show SyFy anymore..so who cares? I say boycott, boycott, boycott…play the tiniest fiddle as they go down in flames
SyFy – meh… Sanctuary – ;-(
I quite enjoyed that ep, although I didn’t like the fact that they forced Zimmerman in to the script.(You don’t need to have the actor in every ep) Meh, otherwise a good ep. Didn’t come off as cheap, though I think the Wermacht CAN take cover from enemy fire and not just stand around while being mowed down.
@Browncoat1984: Don’t even compare BoB to this, while this was good, I just finished that series in a marathon and it was fas superior. No offence to Sanctuary.
lol who saw that coming… all of SGU fans said f*** u to syfy and now Sanctuary is going down, did some1 say called it?? SyFy ruins everything and i think that something like Space should step up and go international… AND BRING SGU BACK
@The Admiral Then MGM should sell the rights to Stargate, just dropping the series and nothing else is a stupid idea, if i had the money to invest it something like SGU i would
Aw Man! This is getting ridiculous. That episode was great just like all the others. I hope I don’t lose another good show I look forward to watching because SyFy screwed up yet again! Can no one at SyFy see this move is killing the show? I saw Imperious’ note and I quote it here- so right you are! SyFy Channel is dying a slow painful death, and it’s all their own fault. The likely out come of this will be that no one at all will approach them to air their shows. Imperious | May 26 @ 4:16 am… Read more »
@ Browncoat: Note that these ratings articles covering sanctuary are not meant to belittle the show, or say “it’s ratings are worse than SGU!!11!!” , rather they are intended to keep track of how the monday experiment is going. So far the results are clear: Before the move the ratings were fine/good, after the move they plummeted to appaling levels. Luckily the show was already renewed. While one can note down the average ratings over a season, because people don’t always watch every week, the ratings have been consistently low, nearly 50% lower than they used to be, after the… Read more »
But SGU was running next to other big shows and Big sport games.
Even though I somewhat enjoy the show, I want to see these ratings drop even more. It’s complete and utter bulls*** that they renewed Sanctuary and cancelled Stargate Universe. Any Stargate fan still watching the channel for anything needs to stop.
SGU hovering around the 1.0 mark with some fluctuation running on Tuesday night against NCIS and the Dancing with the Stars results show and later on Monday against House and Dancing with the Stars performances tells me it would’ve easily been in the 1.7-2.3 range for season 2 episode averages if it had stayed on Friday nights. You probably would’ve also seen a jump to the mid to high 2’s after the mid-season break as well, since the quality of episodes went up exponentially as the writers were settling into the right pace and the actors became more comfortable with… Read more »
GREAT. this will lead to the death of my 2nd to last fav. show (eurEka being my first) and then it will be adios syfy forever. Savor season 4 cause the rate this is going, sancturary will not see a season 5!
Maybe if they brought back SGU they’d get their viewers back too
(i’m not a poet)
lmao, what is the big problem with airing these shows in the summer, where they actually did well
If your as pissed as I am with Syfy you should join the (not endorsed by Gateworld) Boycott at http://www.reformsyfynow.com – There we are working on ways of getting the word out to everyone to stop watching. Until they start making actual science fiction again, we must not watch! We also need to be sure to tune IN to all other science fiction on all other networks, so they can see that they are losing ratings due to policy and not because the genre is getting weaker.
So is this because of Syfy’s incompetence, the boycott, or both?
Part of me really hopes it’s the boycott >:)
anyone who thinks this is because of “boycott” must be really smoking something.
i dont know why people are still bothering even watching that channel anymore they kill more shows then abc
@Ekras I’m sorry, but your boycott isn’t going to work because your demands don’t make sense from a business perspective.
Also, who are you to define what others consider “science fiction” – I for one love Eureka and Warehouse 13 and think they’re great sci-fi shows. Just because YOU don’t like it doesn’t mean its not science fiction.
We haven’t made or even listed our demands yet – Whats on the site now are just ideas in a forum thread to get people discussing possibilities. I was quite clear about this. If you have ideas of your own, please feel free to post them.
Eureka is indeed light-scifi (it’s their last science fiction show). Warehouse 13 is genre-paranormal which is clearly not science fiction. That’s like calling ER or Desperate Housewives science fiction. While there are shows that blur the line (for example Lost) W-13 (while a good enough show which I will borrow the DVD from someone to enjoy) is clearly not one of them. Neither is WWE, Ghost Hunters, Lost Girls, Alphas, or any other shows currently (or soon to be) on Syfail.
Normally I don’t post comments, in fact I had to register for the first time becaue I felt compelled to comment. I am an avid fan of this website, Stargate and until recently SciFi/SyFy. It’s frustrating that there are not more science fiction shows available on this network. BBC America now has Doctor Who and Torchwood (“sigh”… I don’t get these channels.) I’m just not finding much that is good on this channel. Sanctuary is about the only show that I care about until Being Human comes back (love it!) and the new “mutant” show, can’t remember teh title right… Read more »
Some shows go with a bang (Monk, DS9), others with a whisper (Star Trek New Generation, Jag, probably CSI and NCIS will do too). Some go out so bad that they compromise the entire show (Lost), but the only one I know of whose ending basically killed the franchise is BSG. I doubt many will be able to watch any spin-off (prequel or sequel) of that wreck without remembering that ending, and than the channel. Caprica’s ratings were the viewers apologizing for giving BSG such a great image. So what does this have to do the story? Well, nothing, just… Read more »
Can’t say I am surprised. I used to watch Sanctuary, but only because I watched SGU and saw the ads for it. Since SGU was closed out I honestly have no reason at all to tune into SyFy, I haven’t watched it once since the final episode of SGU.
@orfeu Remember when the fans of one life to live asked Oprah to save the show she did a video reply why she could not save the show, because it was not profitable to put on her network. This is the producers fault for making such an expensive show. They should have remembered what happen to firefly. It was a great show it just cost too much to make, and that is why no one would pick it up. Obviously they weren’t willing to budge on the price. Also you can’t take several seasons to get people into your show.… Read more »
@orfeu
I ment to add at the beginning that I agee with you. Sorry.