The CW's new drama,
Life is Wild, premiered to last Sunday to sorely disappointing numbers.
The show's debut only earned 1.642 million viewers, not even 10,000 more than the network's worst-ever opening audience of 1.635 million for the summer production,
Hidden Palms. Worse yet, only three-tenths of a percent of viewers in the CW's target demographic, 18-to-34-year-olds, were among the ones who tuned in that night, setting a new low for a scripted series on the cable network.
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Last year, the network launched the half-hour comedy series
Girlfriends and
The Game in the same 8pm timeslot. The two shows combined drew almost 3 million viewers and 1.2 percent of adults 18 to 34. The network was extremely dissatisfied with the numbers that they moved
7th Heaven to the timeslot. The Sunday broadcast of the now defunct family drama earned a little more than 3 million viewers and also 1.2 percent of the same demographic.
Life is Wild is an adaptation of the popular British drama,
Wild at Heart. The show revolves around a veterinarian who relocates his second wife and their two sets of children to South Africa to work at game reserve run by his former father-in-law. The series stars
D.W. Moffett,
Leah Pipes,
Stephanie Niznik,
Andrew St. John,
Calvin Goldspink and
Atandwa Kani.
The unimpressive series premiere ratings leaves
Life is Wild at a precarious position, but the cast and crew can take solace in the fact that some critics have commended the series for its visually stunning look.
Life is Wild is filmed in location just outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Similar to the show's characters, the entire cast and crew have traded city-living for the meantime and settled into “a 1,500-acre farm, and on the farm are lions and elephant and hippo and giraffe, impala, wildebeest, zebra,” executive producer Michael Rauch said.
"It's just an incredible experience,” Rauch added. “We basically put the animal in the script that we want. If it's scheduled [for] the giraffe [to be] in the yard at 4 o'clock on Thursday, at about 3:55, the giraffe's walks up, waits for the scene to be ready.”
The cast and crew signed up for around 5 months of filming time in South Africa, but given the show's poor reception, there's a looming possibility this may be cut short.
-Lisa Claustro, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Washington Post, Scripps Howard News Service
(Image Courtesy of the CW)