Hugely Unpopular Bubblehead Brings in Big Ratings

Probably half this audience was Palin-haters looking to get their rocks off on what a dunce this woman is.

Sarah Palin’s family reality show-slash-travelogue, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” began on Sunday night before almost five million viewers on TLC.

TLC said it represented the biggest premiere in the channel’s history.

Some have called the series a campaign ad for Ms. Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008 and a possible presidential candidate in 2012. Others have labeled it a get-rich-quick scheme, since she quit her job as governor of Alaska last year. Ms. Palin and Mark Burnett, the well-known reality TV producer, shopped what became “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” to the broadcast networks and to a bevy of cable channels and eventually signed a deal with TLC.

TLC supported “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” with one of its biggest marketing campaigns in memory. One of the online advertisements made a cheeky reference to an “SNL” satire of Ms. Palin: it declared, “I can see ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ from my living room.”

For her part Ms. Palin granted few interviews about the series, preferring to let Mr. Burnett and TLC officials do most of the talking. According to Nielsen, TLC averaged 4.96 million viewers for the first episode. Among 25- to 54-year-olds, the program averaged 1.8 million viewers.

H/T Adam Baldwin.