An exciting week found personal records being set on cable (‘Pawn Stars’) and broadcast (‘NCIS’). In not so happy news, the return of full schedules didn’t do any favors for NBC’s Thursday comedies, or FOX’s ‘Fringe’.

It was a bit of a slow week with President Obama again bringing mayhem to your regularly scheduled programming. The highlight in all of it was the NFL once again flexing its considerable ratings muscles. Over on cable, week two was not kind to MTV’s ‘Skins’.

Mid-season really heats up this with premieres from ‘Harry’s Law’, ‘American Idol’, ‘Skins’, ‘White Collar’, ‘Royal Pains’, and ‘Fairly Legal’. We also saw the debut of ‘Fringe’ on Friday, and the new NBC Thursday. There are also some surprising numbers for ‘The Game’ on BET, and more ‘Jersey Shore’ craziness.

The mid-season premieres continue to roll out, but not with the numbers that the networks might have been hoping for. ‘The Cape’ and ‘Off The Map’ both had less than stellar starts this week, while Bob’s Burgers took a hand-off from the NFL and scored big.

The Visitors are back, and we now know one thing for sure. Red Rain doesn’t do anything to boost ratings. On the other hand, people falling is still a crowd pleaser. ‘Winter Wipeout’ debuted to huge numbers.

Whoa… The broadcast networks only managed six new bits of programming last week. So… yeah… not a lot of numbers to talk about. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still have a ratings post.

As usual, the arrival of the holidays has the network schedules grinding to a halt. That leads to strange things like CBS only having three new hours, and ABC only having two. Or, NBC previewing one of their new shows and having nobody watch it.