Is Ashton Kutcher's Massive 'Social TV' Effect on 'Two and a Half Men' Sustainable?

By now you've probably heard that Monday's ninth-season premiere of the CBS sitcom "Two and a Half Men" scored the series' best-ever ratings , pulling in 28.7 million viewers. The show, of course, has been reformulated following the very public meltdown and exit of its longtime star Charlie Sheen; on this week's episode, Sheen's character was killed off (and mercilessly ridiculed at his funeral), and Sheen's replacement, Ashton "That '70s Show" Kutcher, made his debut. I watched the show after the fact -- the full season-premiere episode is available (for now) at CBS.com's "Two and a Half Men" page -- so I didn't engage in the real-time "social TV" conversation about it. (My day-later reaction: It was great to see Kelso again, but I miss Jackie, Fez, Eric, Donna and Hyde. And especially Red and Kitty.) But given that Ashton Kutcher is deeply associated with social media -- he was famously the first Twitter user to rack up 1 million followers -- it seemed likely that his addition to the show dramatically amplified its "social TV" footprint: the extent to which people talk about it on social media. As it happens, the team at Ad Age 's editorial partner Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge-Mass.-based social-media analysis company that specializes in social TV, told me that they'd collected social-media responses to last year's "Two and a Half Men" season premiere (when Charlie Sheen was still on the show) and this year's, as well as all the airings in between. You know what that means: charticle time! Some notes about the chart below: Stay tuned to AdAge.com for more data from Bluefin Labs. For more about Bluefin, visit its website. Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. Follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.

Is Ashton Kutcher's Massive 'Social TV' Effect on 'Two and a Half Men' Sustainable?

Featured Stories