Last May, CBS announced a bold move, to take their hit The Big Bang Theory off of the Monday night schedule and shift it to Thursdays, to take on NBC’s traditional night of comedy. In its place, the programmers put another show co-created by Chuck Lorre, the creator of Two and a Half Men. On paper, it sounds like a brilliant move. Now that the Mike & Molly’s premiered, how do things look?

Mike & Molly follows Officer Mike Biggs (Billy Gardell) and Molly Flynn (Melissa McCarthy), a fourth grade teacher. They meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and soon fall for one another. Others in the cast are Reno Wilson, Nyambi Nyambi, Katy Mixon, and Swoosie Kurtz.

The new sitcom debuted to a 3.9 rating in the prized 18-49 demographic and 12.2 million total viewers. That was enough to tie with NBC’s The Event for second place in the demo and have the second most number of viewers.

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Historically, the CBS sitcoms who get the post-Two and a Half Men timeslot have done very well. CBS has high expectations however and has ended up cancelling several sitcoms that performed okay on this night. While the sitcom has good initial numbers, it’s not a positive sign that Mike & Molly lost 20% of the lead-in’s demo audience. Last year, Big Bang Theory was building on the lead-in and frequently outperformed Men in the demo.

There was a loss of about 7% of the audience midway through the Mike & Molly first episode so its seems likely those people won’t be back next week. It remains to be seen how many people will. This is a show whose fate will likely be decided over the next several weeks. Right now, things could go either way. Some critics and viewers have wondered how long it will be before the show runs out of material.

What do you think? Is Mike & Molly worth watching? Did you find the fat jokes offensive? Would you cancel or keep it?

Image courtesy CBS.