As you may recall, NBC abruptly pulled the final two episodes of Celebrity Cooking Showdown from their Thursday night and Friday night schedules, substituting reruns of other shows.
Looking at it just in terms of immediate ratings, that may or may not have been a good idea. The Deal or No Deal rerun that ran Friday in place of the last episode of the cooking series won its time slot by a hair. Its first half hour got a 5.0 and the second got a 5.9. Would Celebrity Cooking Showdown have done better there? We'll never know but it doesn't seem likely. Clearly, not much of America got hooked on the bake-off to the point of following it every night. Then again, the finale of a reality show usually does better than an average episode, and the competition on other networks that night wasn't strong.
Saturday night, NBC had a stealth airing of the last two installments of Celebrity Cooking Showdown. Nobody knew they were on and each hour got around a 1.8 rating, which is about as poorly as one can do on a major network. In the TV departments of all the Walmarts across the country, there are usually enough sets tuned to NBC to get a 1.8. Had they aired the shows on Thursday and Friday, they might not have done as well as the reruns put in their place but they'd sure have done better than a 1.8. I'm curious if the folks at NBC think it was a good trade-off.