Twitter might have loved (to hate) Lifetime’s Liz & Dick, but viewers weren’t nearly as enamored. The Lindsay Lohan non-comeback vehicle averaged a disappointing 3.5 million viewers Sunday night, well below the ratings for some of the network’s more recent telepic events. Last month, Lifetime’s Steel Magnolias remake drew 6.5 million pairs of eyeballs, while the lower-profile Abducted: The Carlina White Story brought in 4.1 million viewers (on a Saturday night, when fewer viewers are home watching TV). And back in January, Rob Lowe’s Drew Peterson: Untouchable attracted just under 6 million viewers.
Liz & Dick also performed well below all three of the above movies among viewers under 50. Lifetime is correctly touting Liz & Dick as the fourth biggest first-run cable TV movie of the year (leaving out the monster numbers of Hatfields & McCoys on sister net History, as well as anything on Disney or HBO). Liz & Dick was hardly a turkey, except among critics. But given all the hype surrounding the project and how little competition there is in the TV movie marketplace these days (sorry, Hallmark Channel!), finishing fourth among tentpole Lifetime movies hardly qualifies as a smashing success and probably ranks as a mild bummer.