Sons of Anarchy Season 3:

Tonight is the 90 minutes season two finale of Sons of Anarchy. It seems like only yesterday that I was declaring it my new favorite show. That’s because it practically was. By early October I was singing the praises of SOA, and now I’ll be going without for the next 9 months or so. I’d be sad, but three month love affairs describe 95% of my loving relationships so I’m used to it.

Plus, despite not officially being renewed yet, SOA will be back! Hopefully that announcement will come soon, but I see no way the show doesn’t get renewed. FX not renewing Sons of Anarchy — it’s highest-rated show by a fairly wide margin — would be way, way, crazier than FOX’s renewal of Dollhouse.

Plus, we have Kurt Sutter’s blog to entertain us between seasons. And you have to figure that in the astronomical event that SOA wasn’t renewed it would at least result in one of the most entertaining blog posts EVER. Sutter has said the show would be renewed and that negotiations for a season 3 are relatively complex because most of the existing contracts are two year deals that need to be renegotiated.

I recently got an e-mail from someone suggesting to me that both mainstream media and websites heaped more praise on FX’s Damages than SOA. I haven’t found that to be the case though, at least not on any of the web sites I regularly read. I could have remembered wrong, but I’m pretty sure Alan Sepinwall wrote last season that he’d decided Damages wasn’t for him and deleted it from his DVR’s season pass list.

Perhaps it could be that originally the mainstream media salivated over Damages more because it’s a show set and filmed in NY and even the Hollywood media has a lot of east coast bias when it comes to New York. Plus, Glenn Close did win an Emmy for her portrayal of Patty Hewes.

But what really matters is what FX thinks and even if the suits at FX wanted to like Damages more than SOA, they look at the ratings and they can’t. SOA’s season two ratings are about three times better than the ratings for season two of Damages.

Of course, we seldom see the data for viewing by households with high annual income for broadcast shows and see it even less for cable shows. It could be that Damages has the wealthier viewers on a percentage basis, but last season the audience for Damages was so small and SOA’s is so much bigger that I’d be pretty surprised if SOA didn’t have more high income viewers on an absolute basis.

Either way, Glenn Close and crew probably never sold any Harley-Davidsons, and I’m pretty sure that Johnny Lewis (”Half Sack”) and Mark Boone Junior (Bobby “Elvis” Munson) have sold a few.

You can catch the season finale tonight at 10pm on FX. If you need something to do between now and then you can listen to Kurt Sutter’s interview with Kim Masters on KCRW (special thanks to Mr. Sutter for listing TV by the Numbers as one of his favorite TV-biz blogs!) and read Maureen Ryan’s in-depth feature on SOA including a lengthy in interview with Sutter (there are no spoilers about the finale).

Hopefully we’ll be posting the info on SOA’s renewal before the ratings for the season two finale, but we should have the ratings info sometime Wednesday afternoon.




credit: http://tvbythenumbers.com