I guess I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t entertained by Penn & Teller “Off the Deep End” (a self-fulfilling prophesy of a title if I ever saw one.)

According to ratings figures, the P&T television special managed to get beaten by everything except reruns of Reba.

Wow.

If that’s not bad enough, ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos had more viewers than the P&T special.

Ouch.

In the event some major television network again extends the opportunity for Penn & Teller to produce a television special, I hope they manage to produce one that people find entertaining. All in all, it seemed to me this television special would have been more at home on the WB network, where audiences are used to being abused and taken for granted.

UPDATE: “Someone” took me to task today, suggesting I don’t know my shoe from container of Shinola when it comes to television ratings. Well, please allow me a bit of arrogance so that I can climb out on this shakey limb and suggest I may know just a little about television ratings. You know, and stuff.

When your television show gets its ass kicked by America’s Funniest Home Videos — and the calendar shows it is the year 2005 — your ratings suck. Even stripping away my, you know, limited knowledge of ratings and that sort of stuff, it seems a bit obvious.

Also, comparing P&T’s broadcast television ratings last night to Criss Angel’s cable phenomenon seems a bit — oh, how shall I put this? — specious? And that’s being generous. Yes, it’s simply embarassing that the local guy, who swept the election with a landslide win in the city council race, didn’t get as many raw votes as the losing state governor got. I’ll bet the local guy’s constituents are all torn up about it.

Criss Angel is singularly responsible for A&E, known for delivering codger ratings to the doorstep of agencies the world over, to break into the 25-54 money demo. (Or something like that. I only overheard stuff like that at the nearby table over lunch one day last week.) Criss Angel delivers the goods where it counts, and he’s rightly praised for it. And, just like P&T, Angel is using his success as a stout platform on which to launch his personal success in the land of little pieces of paper sporting pictures of dead presidents on them. I wish him all the success in the world.

The bottom line is the ratings from last night support the suggestion that I wasn’t alone in thinking the show was not entertaining. If the P&T fanboys and fangirls are happy with the emperor’s new suit, God bless them all I say. For me this isn’t love/hate for Penn & Teller — when it comes to the P&T act these days, I’m agnostic — it’s simply that I didn’t find the show entertaining on any level.