“Dollhouse,” “Sarah Connor” Benefit from Live+7 Ratings

Even geeks go out on Friday nights. And now, Nielsen is recognizing that.

I’ve been waiting eagerly for months for the premiere of Joss Whedon’s new show, “Dollhouse.” But my excitement was tempered when Fox banished it to 8:00 p.m. Central on Friday nights — universally known as the “Friday night death slot” where no show on Fox, save “The X-Files,” has ever thrived, almost all being cancelled within a single season. (And even “The X-Files” was moved to Sunday for the final six years of its run.) So I’ve been very conflicted the last few weeks; I love the show as much as I expected to, but as I’ve previously mentioned, Fox has a long history of disappointing me.

But there is a ray of hope. As reported today, both “Dollhouse” and its lead-in, “Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles,” have benefited greatly from the Nielsen Live+7 ratings. This system, begun in January 2006, has allowed the Nielsen system to finally catch up with DVR technology. Rather than simply reporting how many viewers watch television shows as they air live, the Live+7 ratings also report data on how many people watch a show on their digital video recorders within a week of the episode’s original air date.

The Live+7 ratings may make a huge difference in ensuring that “Dollhouse” has a future. Ratings for the pilot episode were originally considered mediocre-to-disappointing, with middling ratings despite airing against reruns. However, the Live+7 ratings showed that the viewership was actually a full 30% higher when DVR viewings were included. In fact, among shows watched on DVR, “Dollhouse” ranked 28th out of all network shows for the week. Add to that the fact that the “Dollhouse” pilot ranked #1 on iTunes and #10 in online pirating for the week, and it’s clear that the old ratings systems alone are no longer getting the job done.

This is great news for those of us who have been underrepresented in Nielsen ratings for years — those of us who lead lives that are too busy to allow us to watch television programs as they air. It’s been a long time coming, but television ratings have finally caught up to the fact that the average American household no longer spends most nights settling in early in front of the television together after a family dinner cooked at home.

And it’s great news for fans of quality television, because the Live+7 ratings may just be the best hope for extending the lives of shows that would otherwise be cancelled before their time.