A lot of its disappointed fans were happy when NBC decided to bring back its acclaimed detective series Life, which went off the air December of last year.  The series, which aired Wednesdays on its debut season, premiered September and was cut short by the Writers' Strike causing only 11 of the 22 episodes to air.

As it turned out, however, not a lot of people missed Life during its nine-month hiatus.  Its September 29 premiere attracted a mere 6.9 million viewers, a staggering 30 percent drop from its first season pilot.  It was another story altogether during its second week, when it debuted in its new Friday timeslot at 10pm, when it hooked 5.4 million, finishing third in its hour.

Life wasn't the only show suffering from dwindling ratings.  Even the standard hit and Life lead-in Heroes lost close to a million viewers during its second episode.  Chuck was down 28 percent from last fall's premiere, scoring 6.6 million viewers.  Almost everything was down, including The Big Bang Theory (7 percent), How I Met Your Mother (10 percent), Two and a Half Men (8 percent), and even the usual ratings juggernaut CSI: Miami (17 percent).

On Life's pilot called “Find Your Happy Place,” we were introduced to John Armstrong, a man who works with greeting cards at a stationery company.  He was suspected of killing people by putting people in trunks and letting them suffocate.  There is also that ice cream truck driver who sold something other than ice cream from his truck.

On the sophomore episode, meanwhile, entitled “Everything… All the Time,” Crews (Damian Lewis) and Reese (Sarah Shahi) encountered a man beaten and tied to a chair at the bottom of a pool.  The case led them to an underground party circuit.

Catch a new episode of Life tonight at 10pm when a body of a cancer research scientist is found frozen.


-Glenn L. Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Variety, Entertainment Weekly, NBC
(Image Courtesy of NBC)