‘Dallas’ Off To Strong Premiere In U.K., Series’ Mitch Pileggi Upped To Regular

COMMENTS (7)

• Good for him. Shouldn’t that be The X Files in brackets? I doubt when people think of Pileggi they think of Sons Of Anarchy (As brilliant as that show is)

  Comment by dee123 — Friday September 7, 2012 @ 5:34am PDT  Reply to this post

• To provide context, Channel 5 rarely gets anything above 1 million viewers in printings hours. Celebrity Big Brother is their most successful franchise at the moment, and it only gets 1-1.5 million viewers for the 2/3 weeks it is on. Dallas’ numbers were HUGE for channel 5, and that is up against high profile UK drama on BBC1 and ITV, and Channel 4′s Paralympics coverage. Once they are out of the way, forecasters are predicting Dallas’ figures might even rise.

  Comment by Dizzle — Friday September 7, 2012 @ 6:11am PDT  Reply to this post

  • Thanks for the context. Since America has 5x the population, 3m in the UK equals 15M American, a virtually unheard of number nowadays for anything but the most popular shows and sports. TNT only got 6M or so, perfectly respectable but not amazing.

    Comment by Temis — Friday September 7, 2012 @ 11:16am PDT  Reply to this post

• The real question will be whether or not the audience comes back for the second week. Dallas opened huge for TNT, then fell quite a bit, into the range of a modest success. But the numbers did rise significantly for the season finale, so that’s a positive.

  Comment by Miffy — Friday September 7, 2012 @ 9:57am PDT  Reply to this post

• What about Channel 2, or 3? What is it with the UK’s telly system-do there TV’s only go from 2-13, since its only VHF? Hows the UHF on them? Jiggling them rabbit ears much? Do they have HD over there, or do they call it GRAND Definition?

  Comment by brutony — Friday September 7, 2012 @ 2:46pm PDT  Reply to this post

  • Presuming this is a serous question, I shall explain…

    In the old days of analogue television (picked up through an aerial) we had two BBC Channels, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, and latterly Channel 5, all broadcasting on UHF on the 625 line pal television format.

    By law in the UK you have to have a television license to receive any television transmission, this is a government tax which is used to fund the commercial free BBC. The other channels are funded by advertising.

    Of these BBC 1 and ITV were and still are the biggest players in terms of audience where as BBC 2, Channel 4, and Channel 5 are considered more minority channels and delivering much smaller audiences. (5 being the youngest channel, having started in 1997, delivering the smallest audience.)

    Itv until 2002 was made up of 16 individual regional television stations serving parts of the UK all part of the ITV network, sharing each others shows etc. They mostly all merged to form ITV1.

    Cable and satellite television started to become popular in the 1990′s, adding more channels, the arrival of digital television in 1998 saw even more, including additional ones from the 5 analogue channels. This also saw the introduction of Widescreen transmissions.

    By October 2012 the analogue system will have been completely turned off and everything now is digital. High Definition or HD as it is known began around 2006 and in the past few years more channels have begun to broadcast in HD, although the SD Standard definition is still the default option.

    Hope this helps.

    Comment by Keith — Saturday September 8, 2012 @ 1:55am PDT  Reply to this post

• I think about Stargate Atlantis

  Comment by flanfan — Tuesday September 11, 2012 @ 1:49pm PDT  Reply to this post