The ratings for Comedy Central's roast of James Franco are in, and surprise, surprise: They're good. According to Variety, 3.1 million people tuned into the roast's Monday premiere to watch Hollywood stars like Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Jonah Hill, and Bill Hader make fun of Franco, and a total 5.2 million watched the roast over two airings. These numbers are way up from Comedy Central's last roast, which was of Roseanne Barr — that telecast earned 2.6 million viewers total, and headlines like "Roseanne's Rotting Roast." Yikes.
Even more importantly, ratings were high amongst the 18-49 demo, and the telecast pulled in 2.4 million viewers from that audience. These numbers are really what networks look at when determining whether or not a show was successful in the ratings or not, because this tends to be all advertisers look at.
The only bit of bad news that Variety points out, perhaps, is the fact that these ratings didn't seem to beat Charlie Sheen's 2011 roast (which garnered 6.43 million viewers), but that seems like an unfair comparison because 2011 was the year of "tiger blood" and #winning for Sheen.
All James Franco really has is his crazy list of side-projects, and it's impressive enough that that was enough to get 5.2 million people to to tune in. In other words: Good job, James Franco. Good job.
