The last few weeks have been troublesome for this fandom at best, with very little good news emerging from the United States. However, the international premiere of the 2008 series has been creating some news of its own, with the backdoor pilot bringing in over 500,000 viewers on the UK Sci Fi channel last week.
The UK is the place of origin for our next piece of news, as this week, the first episode of the 2008 series, A Knight in Shining Armor, which was aired in a two hour block along with Joss Whedon's newly renewed Dollhouse.
As UK members of our community know, 500,000 viewers is a large audience for a niche cable and satellite channel in our country, and only Heroes had a substantially larger audience during its brief tenure on the channel.
This is where we get to the good stuff. In a piece of news that I'm sure NBC won't have missed, the UK audience jumped a whopping 35% last night, drawing in over 700,000 viewers, making Knight Rider and Dollhouse an excellent combination that has secured the 2008 series a solid second place on the channels list of most watched programs since the turn of the new millennium.
Whilst times are tough for us at the moment, it's important to remember the effect that the international audience had on the original series, as the fat lady may be bellowing her lungs out, but the final chord is yet is to be played in spite of the show being dropped from NBC's fall schedule.
For the full press release from the Sci Fi UK channel's website, hit the jump.
