CBS Moves ‘Wickedly Perfect’ to Saturdays

This week, CBS announced that they’re moving their new reality show Wickedly Perfect from Thursday nights to Saturday nights. The original plan was to move the show from its 8 p.m. slot when the next season of Survivor started up on February 17th. Now, however, the show will make its move early, allowing CBS to show reruns of shows like Without a Trace in its place.

The decision was discussed after The Will failed to entice viewers on Saturdays at 8 p.m. (The show only aired one episode, on Saturday, January 8th.) After Wickedly Perfect’s ratings declined for three weeks, CBS decided to go ahead with the transfer.

In its first two weeks, Wickedly Perfect attracted about 8.7 million viewers, less than half of the average amount of viewers who watched Survivor: Vanuatu in the same timeslot. The third episode of Wickedly Perfect only garnered 7.8 million viewers. Thanks to this, the ratings for the show’s competitors – The O.C. and Joey – went up.

On the one hand, the Saturday slot hasn’t been kind this season. Before The Will, CBS aired Clubhouse at 8 p.m. on that night. Neither The Will nor Clubhouse, which only lasted a handful of episodes, managed to attract even five million viewers.

On the other hand, the move could make a huge difference for Wickedly Perfect. Without the competition of Joey and The O.C., the show could flourish. Of course, it could also find itself down in the Designer Dungeon.

If I had to guess, I would say that the move isn’t going to bring about much of a change. The show’s main problems seem to lie in the format. The contestants engage in two competitions each week – one against another team and one against the members of their own team. The two teams are given a task, such as throwing a dinner party, and are told that they will be judged on various criteria. They are also given the responsibility of creating an “individual project” which showcases each contestant’s strengths.

Once the teams are judged on the team tasks and the winner is announced, the judges reveal which two individual projects they consider the weakest. These two “weakest” players are then put on the chopping block and voted off by one of their teammates. This pits the teammates against each other in an attempt to create tension that so far has not come to much.

As fans and contestants alike have stated, the show would work better if the judges chose which of the “weakest” contestants should be eliminated from the competition. This would guarantee that the contestants are being judged on their talents rather than their personal relationships with their teammates. If the show doesn’t do any better on Saturdays than it did on Thursdays, maybe CBS will figure out where the problem actually lies.

Jenn Brasler is an aspiring writer from Falls Church, VA. You can e-mail her at luckyjenn@hotmail.com. She’s trying to decide whether to use her powers for good… or evil.

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