ratings

If your your dreams were filled with anachronistic pop songs and gold glitter last night, blame it on Baz Luhrmann. The trailer for his latest film, The Great Gatsby, hit the Internet yesterday like a Rolls Royce hitting Myrtle Wilson (too soon?).


The restlessness approached hysteria?

With its thumping soundtrack, glitz, glamour, tragic romance, and frenzied edits, you'd know this thing was a Luhrmann production from a mile away. And if opinions around the Bitch office are any indicator, you either LOVE it or you LOATHE it. To help you further appreciate (or hatepreciate as the case may be) the Great Gatsby, let's look at the trailers all of Baz Luhrmann's feature-length films (don't worry, there are only five) and rate them on what I'm calling The Luhrmann Index.

ABC Family has cancelled one of my favorite shows of the last year—Huge. (On the chance you missed it, I highly recommend watching it online on ABC Family’s website. Hopefully they’ll leave it up awhile.)

It’s sad, though not surprising. Huge had the kind of pedigree that often spells network doom. It was created by Winnie Holzman, whose other most famous achievement is the also-one-season critical darling My So-Called Life. It was also a summer series—rarely ratings bonanzas—and it only aired on a niche network. Still, that considered, it averaged about 1.9 million viewers over its run, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that the third season of Mad Men, for all its critical adulation, only averaged about 1.8 million viewers during its third season. It’s true that the math is different on a network than at a cable channel, in terms of an acceptable amount of viewers, but still.