Global Television’s primetime soap Falcon Beach premiered to 576,000 viewers on Jan. 5 in its 8 p.m. timeslot, according to BBM, despite stiff competition from hockey coverage on TSN.

The heavily publicized Canadian-made drama ran against the gold medal match at the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championships on TSN, which garnered an audience average of 3.3 million. It also ran against Opening Night on CBC, and a CSI repeat on CTV. Not bad, but not great considering the show’s massive promo push.

‘I think you have to manage expectations around what actually happened on the night it aired, but given the competition, we’re delighted with how [Falcon Beach] came out,’ says Barbara Williams, SVP of CanWest MediaWorks. ‘The composition of the audience was terrific.’

Approximately 301,000 of the viewers fell into the 18-49 demographic, according to BBM, with about 210,000 of those viewers being women. The premiere repeated on Sunday, Jan. 8 at 10 p.m. to 224,000 and again on Wednesday, Jan. 11 at 10 p.m., rebounding to 356,000.

The Thursday night show will move to Wednesdays when Survivor returns to Global on Feb. 2. New episodes will repeat on the following Saturdays at 8 p.m.

According to BBM numbers, the second episode, aired on Jan. 12, sunk to a 364,000 national audience. Falcon’s MOW pilot brought in nearly 400,000 last January.

www.globaltv.com