Hallmark’s strategy to use Thanksgiving as a way to grab viewers and keep them through its big holiday programming season seemed to be a huge success, reports Variety.

Over the course of its Countdown to Christmas event, which ran over the five nights of Thanksgiving weekend, Hallmark Channel featured one original movie each night. A Christmas Detour (pictured above and starring Candace Cameron Bure and Paul Greene) did the best of these, averaging a 0.68 among adults 18-49 and 4.78 million viewers overall on Saturday, November 28. While that was far behind AMC’s top-two scripted shows — The Walking Dead with nearly 14 million viewers for its mid-season finale and Into the Badlands with more than 5 million — it still earned third place among all scripted series on cable.

Two of its other movies also did well: Crown for Christmas on Friday, which also scored a 0.68 in the demo and 4.29 million viewers, and Angel of Christmas on Sunday, which did a 0.54 among adults 18-49 and 3.32 million viewers.

The best performance for a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie remains Christmas Under Wraps — which also starred Bure. Last year at this time, that movie grabbed 5.8 million viewers.

Among all cable networks for the week of Thanksgiving (Nov. 23 - 29), Hallmark Channel ranked second in primetime among total viewers with an all-time high of 2.48 million. That was only behind ESPN with 3.45 million. Hallmark Channel was the top network among its key demographic of women 25-54, averaging a 0.86. It was sixth among adults 18-49 and third among women 18-49.

Besides this year’s originals, Hallmark also filled its slate with repeats of Christmas movies from previous years. Countdown to Christmas continues this week with such movies as Just in Time for Christmas on Saturday, and Karen Kingsbury’s The Bridge on Sunday.

Brief Take: If you ever wondered why networks invest so much in holiday fare, now you know.

Read more at Variety.

[Cube image courtesy of Variety.]

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