‘Amish’ draws a real crowd

“Amish in the City” may have drawn some complaints before it aired, but Wednesday’s debut of the unscripted series scored a huge success for UPN.

“Amish,” which puts a group of young Amish in a Los Angeles-area house with some more streetwise city kid, drew an audience of 5.2 million and gave UPN a rare second-place finish for the night in both total viewers and the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research. Only Fox did better, with its reality hit “Simple Life 2” and the summer original sitcoms “Quintuplets” and “Method & Red.”

“Amish” did particularly well in 14 major cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Boston. It also delivered high ratings in Philadelphia, despite the fact that many Pennsylvania legislators, protective of the state’s Amish population, strongly criticized the series when it was first announced.

ABC, CBS and NBC would likely have done better had they not disrupted their schedules in order to air (low-rated) coverage of the Democratic National Convention in prime time in many parts of the country.

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Jonathan Taylor