daysee8

I think it was a good time slot given the fact that MANY restaurants are closed on Sundays or close early on Sundays thereby capturing a surething audience. The time slot was probably chosen for a couple of reasons -- first, for the natural restaurant-interested audience. More importantly, because NBC has not had as much luck as some of the other networks with reality programming, so they tend to run their reality shows on nights that other networks are not running any to compete with it -- Monday's with their gross out reality, and Sundays at 10 with their "a look at a day in the life of X profession" shows. Granted, Crime and Punishment is much better "day in the life" programming than The Restaurant in my opinion -- and Dick Wolf is a better TV producer than Mark Burnett as I see it. But as the ratings see it, the viewers disagree with me since The Restaurant has done better than Crime and Punishment.

I don't really consider myself a foodie, nor have I ever worked in the food industry, so I've been content to just lurk around here thus far. But since I work in the media industry, this is a topic I feel like I can offer something relevant. What Zenial said is right -- Sunday night is a very low night for viewership, and it is very rare to have top 20 programs on Sunday nights (unless it's something special of course like the Oscars or Super Bowl). Honestly, the rating rankings really don't matter that much at all in the world of ratings that really matters - advertising revenues. Ratings performances are more important as they perform in comparison to other programs in that same time period, and how a show performs in comparison to the show that aired before it (audience retention). The first episode of The Restaurant had a smaller audience than Crime and Punishment which was in the time period the week before, but the audience for The Restaurant has grown every week since then. More imporantly, after the first week or two, the show added to NBC's share of the audience from the lead in, Law and Order: CI. that means in theory the show got everyone watching Law and Order to stick around, and added even more people, which is in the eyes of programmers, the very best thing a show can do. So The Restaurant HAS been considered a ratings success by NBC. Perhaps not a ratings bonanza, but a success nonetheless.