Young Viewers Tune Out "Secret of Skinwalker Ranch"; Plus: The Return of "Rob Riggle: Global Investigator" Delivers Humiliating Ratings

This week Ancient Aliens is off (returning next week), so I am also taking the weekend off. But I do want to pass along the ratings data for this big week in pseudo-documentaries. On Tuesday The Curse of Oak Island brought in 3.5 million viewers, while its lead-out, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch had a soft launch, fumbling more than a third of its lead-in. Skinwalker brought in just 2.0 million viewers—high for cable, but disappointing compared to its lead in. It lost fully one-half of all the Oak Island viewers under the age of 49, earning a 0.34 rating in the 18-49 demo to Oak Island’s 0.70. Turns out that the ceiling on interest in space poltergeists remains fairly stubbornly set at 2.0 million mostly older viewers, just as it has been for almost ever alien-themed cable pseudo-documentary. The only silver lining is that Skinwalker built massively on the even poorer ratings for the show it replaced, Project Blue Book, which had only 1.4 million viewers when it left the air last month. Skinwalker is therefore the most successful Oak Island companion series, and seems destined to run itself into the ground for years if it can keep up ratings. Meanwhile, Rob Riggle: Global Investigator totally shit the bed with ratings that made its Sunday failure look like a success. After failing hard with only 650,000 viewers on Sunday and being pulled from the valuable broadcasting night, the relaunched Discovery Channel series humiliated itself by drawing just 489,000 viewers in its new Thursday timeslot, with a 0.13 rating among adults 18-49. By comparison, the same night last week had twice as many viewers for Discovery’s Homestead Rescue, and three times as many for the same show the week before that. Riggle’s show is actively repelling Discovery’s viewers.