The premiere episode of FX's 'Justified' was a lot of fun to watch and apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought so.

Tuesday's episode, titled "Fire in the Hole" after the Elmore Leonard novella upon which the series is based, scored 4.2 million sets of eyeballs, the network's second highest rating since the premiere of 'The Shield.'

Naturally, the show scored more older than younger viewers, but my gut tells me that could change once word spreads about the type of show it is and the quality it can produce. Sure it's a pseudo-western, but it has a very updated and edgy feel. It's fun for the whole family, if your family is one of those weird groups that lets their kids watch anything whether it's an edgy Western drama or late night Cinemax.

If you're watching television right now, congratulations. You are part of a new world record.

The Nielsen Company announced that TV viewing for the 2008-09 season reached a new high in average watching time. Now the average American spends four hours and 49 minutes every day in front of the idiot box and the average household spends more than eight hours a day watching television. ("God bless America, land where we loaf, staring down from, our favorite futon, all day and night at the light of HBO")

However, this doesn't mean everyone to celebrating. In fact, the big four networks (five if you count the CW) actually saw a decline in viewers because we have so many other choices now between cable and the Internet. Do you any of you actually watch that much television?

Did you see Mad Men recently? As part of Harry's creating a TV division at the Sterling Cooper ad agency, he was made responsible for screening scripts of TV fare so that the content pleased/satisfied/supported the advertisers' desires. Interestingly, it was Joan -- the office manager/head secretary -- who was given the scripts to read and her main focus of As the World Turns.

She became completely engrossed in the 1962 Oakdale story in which a character came to from a coma with a new personality. Her enthusiasm for the soap story convinced the advertisers to back As the World Turns rather than Love of Life, another CBS soap at the time.

Mad Men was historically accurate about As the World Turns. It was the top-rated soap opera for 20 years -- 1958-1978 -- and in 1962 (the year in which Mad Men is currently set), ATWT had increased its share from 47.7 to 53.7 in just a year. It was the soap on the rise and over half all TVs on in daytime were watching this CBS soap.

NBC is trying to get Nielsen Media Research to move sweeps week in February, 2009. The reason for this is due to the nationwide switch to pure digital television scheduled for February 17th of that year.

I can understand NBC's point of view. Advertising is their primary source of revenue and anything to mess with that model could only negatively impact their bottom line. I'm surprised more of the networks haven't jumped onto this bandwagon.

Nielsen Media is apparently looking to almost triple the number of homes over the next 4 years that report Nielsen ratings, according to an MSNBC article. Currently the company has 12,000 households with 35,000 people and it is looking to increase it to 37,000 homes with 100,000 people.

Frankly, I think the entire ratings system should be overhauled. Since there are now so many different methods of watching a television show, from iTunes to DVRs to DVDs, it has become impossible to track exactly how many people and of what type are watching a show. From the article, it does sound like Nielsen is trying to move in this direction with more sophisticated tracking. The networks now even want Nielsen to break down the viewership by age, race and whether they understand Linux for more target marketing. Isn't that a form of discrimination?

A new report from Nielsen Media Research shows The Office is very popular among people who own DVRs. While the show only gets a national average rating of 3.7, it gets 8.7 with DVR owners. We already know that it's hugely popular on iTunes and now is NBC getting an idea of how we watch television: when we want and where we want. It should be interesting to see whether this Nielsen data about DVR owners changes the way networks choose their programming -- or at least maybe it'll change the way networks decide to cancel programs. After all, The Office would've been dead if it weren't for iTunes. What shows will DVRs save from termination?

The average American home has more televisions than people. When I saw that statistic from Nielsen Media Research, I thought I was bucking the trend. And then I thought a little harder and realized I'm the average American. There are two people in my household: my husband and myself. And, guess how many television sets we have? Three! There's the main set in our living room, hooked up to two TiVos, a Nintendo and a DVD player. Then there's the TV set in our bedroom, which we got this summer when it was 104 degrees and the only air conditioning in our house was in the master bedroom. Oh, and that elusive third television set is in the garage. It's positioned right in front of the very dusty treadmill. Still, it's plugged in and it sort-of works (the pixels are dying so it looks like everything is in letterbox).

I wanna know: How many television sets in your home? And, which rooms are they in? This could get interesting...

Nielsen Media Research will start monitoring commercial viewing habits starting in November. The Wall Street Journal reports that this could lead to a decline in advertising rates since Nielsen is expected to learn what we already know: we tune out commercials. This hard evidence could lead to an increase of product placement, or advertising within a program instead of during program breaks. I'm not quite sure how Nielsen will know that viewers have walked away from the television for a snack or a bathroom break during commercials. It looks like they'll actually be tracking the way we use our DVRs and whether we fast-forward through commercials. This article in the Seattle PI says that CBS has already done some research and discovered that 40-50% of people with DVRs still watch commercials. Do these people not know how DVRs work?