TAR5 (& BB5) premiere Tue July 6

[CantGetEnufTAR]

I am a little worry about the schedule. If I remember correctly, TAR2 (or TAR3) was premiered on Monday at 10 pm and it didn't have very good ratings.

Correct, TAR2 premiered on a Monday (for some crazy reason) not sure of the time. One of the reasons that the premiere may have not done too well is because the show wasn't going to be on Mondays the rest of the season. Weird. They don't premiere Survivor on Wednesdays at 8pm (for example) when they know the season will be on Thursdays at 7pm. But, for some reason they thought a Monday premiere for TAR2 was the right thing to do.

That Monday premiere was actually about average for the season. It had 9.0 million viewers. Then, ONLY TWO DAYS LATER, the second episode in its normal Wednesday timeslot was shown. That second and also the third episode are still the 2nd and 3rd highest viewed TAR episodes of all time (barely behind only the finale to TAR1). Reason -- during those two weeks CBS was showing NCAA March Madness Basketball stuff on Thursdays, so moved Survivor to Wednesdays temporarily, so it became TAR2's lead-in show for those two weeks. Total viewers those two weeks were 12.5 million and 13.3 million respectively. That's 40-50% ABOVE the premiere viewers. That's what a good lead-in show can do for TAR.

[SQFreak]

Trimming to 11 teams COULD have been cost-related.

Do you think that a team could have dropped out at the last second, not leaving enough time to go back and pull another team from the pool? ("The last second" could easily be a month or two months before the start of filming.)

[NCDave]

Here's a new promo:

http://www.cbs.com/video/video_mod.h...e5_promo.shtml

[karalott]

Do you think that a team could have dropped out at the last second, not leaving enough time to go back and pull another team from the pool? ("The last second" could easily be a month or two months before the start of filming.)

Could be. There was supposed to be 12 teams for TAR2 (I heard two different things why there was only 11, one of them being that a team dropped out at the last minute. The other was the producers changed there minds about adding an extra team.) I wonder if they'll have 12 teams for TAR6.

[John]

Please stop posting spoilers from the introduction videotape in this thread. It is not marked a containing spoilers, and they do not belong in this thread.

Start a new thread, and clearly mark it, to discuss the videotape.

[CantGetEnufTAR]

To SQFreak--I don't know. I've heard that they have one or two alternates that are supposed to have all of the shots/passports/visas/"training" that the main teams have. So, it would seem unlikely that drop-outs would cause a drop in the number of teams. Maybe if it was extremely last-minute, but I'd say it would almost have to happen within days of the starting line.

The teams go to LA for a week or so before the starting line. That's when they get their final "training", do promotional stuff, etc, then wait. Maybe if a team drops out during that time, it would be too late to replace them. But, any time before that, say if only 11 of 12 teams actually show up in LA for this week, one of the alternates I imagine could be brought in pronto to replace them. Of course, there's always the possibility that an alternate backs out.

I just hope they go back to 12 (or more) teams in the future.