We're Back

Happy New Year! This is The T Dog Media Blog. Welcome Back.

Took a New Year's breather, so let's catch up on what's been going on:

- Giants-Patriots draws large audience: The NFL triplecast of the New England Patriots - New York Giants game Saturday Night, in which the Patriots beat the Giants to become the first team in NFL History to go 16-0 in the regular season - drew a cumulative 34.5 million viewers over CBS, NBC, and the NFL Network - plus WCVB-TV in Boston, WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., and WWOR-TV in New York. It was the highest-rated regular-season game since November 26, 1995 when NBC aired a Thanksgiving Day game featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the Dallas Cowboys.

- The holidays also brought good tidings to the NHL: The Winter Classic, which featured a game featuring the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Buffalo Sabres - in the first-ever outdoor game in the United States - drew a 2.6 overnight household rating and 5 share - the highest rated regular-season NHL game on network TV since February 3, 1996, when Fox nabbed a 3.0/9 for its regional coverage.

Not surprisingly, the game drew in highest ratings in Pittsburgh (WPXI) and Buffalo (WGRZ). As for Midwestern cities, only Minneapolis (KARE) and St. Louis (KSDK) made the top 10. Chicago didn't make the top 10 (neither did New York and Los Angeles), and the game was pre-empted in Indianapolis.

- The late-night talk show hosts returned last night with David Letterman and Craig Ferguson and their writers, and Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel without theirs. It seemed that Letterman and Ferguson had the advantage of having their writers, while Leno and O' Brien did not. Sad part about this is, a joke WMAQ-TV sports anchor Bruce Wolf during the station's 10 p.m. newscast (about how long it would take for the Illini to return to the Rose Bowl and the Bears to return to the Super Bowl) was funnier than anything Leno had to say. Heck, make Wolf the host of The Tonight Show.