Looks like the easiest way for TV executives to boost ratings on their TV shows is to find the youngest girl they can and make her pregnant.
That's what has happened with Jamie Lynn Spears' Nickelodeon show Zoey 101. The just-broadcast season finale of Zoey 101 – the first episode since Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy – recorded viewing figures twice as high as usual.
Special mention should be given to the lucrative Dirty Old Middle-Aged Men demographic, which we imagine has gone sky high since Jamie Lynn Spears revealed that she was sexually active.
Although in theory the biggest victim of Jamie Lynn Spears' teenage pregnancy – thanks to a perfect storm of genetic makeup, family history and the fact that it's doomed to spend the rest of its life on the same family tree as Kevin Federline – the second biggest was thought to be Zoey 101, Jamie Lynn Spears' zany Nickelodeon teen sitcom.
You'll remember, of course, that days after Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy Nickelodeon swiftly killed off Zoey 101 for fear that the sight of a pregnant teenager on TV would corrupt the world's youth so much that they'd start drinking from Daddy's whisky bottle and listening to this new-fangled rock and roll music.
At the time it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do, because nobody wanted to watch another Sabrina The Teenage Witch where the lead character is obviously about 45 years old and holding a cigarette behind her back as she delivers her lines, but now it seems like a strange phenomenon is developing.
It seems as though people actually want to watch Zoey 101 more now that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. Sky reports:
Following the announcement that Brit's sis is to be a teen mum, more than double the normal amount of viewers tuned in to watch the season finale of Jamie Lynn's Nickelodeon show Zoey 101… Jamie Lynn's baby announcement appears to have in fact drawn people in. With 7.3 million viewers tuning in for the end of Zoey 101's third season, Nickelodeon have now confirmed they'll be going ahead with a fourth season to be aired this February.
Obviously most of these viewers will have watched the show out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, wondering to themselves "Who is this slut?" and then being slightly stunned that, unlike her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears can speak using full sentences and a range of more than two extreme emotions.
And – we'll hold our hands up too here – the news of Jamie Lynn Spears getting pregnant made us watch Zoey 101 too. Admittedly it was shit and we turned off after about ten seconds, but it's more than we've managed before. So maybe this tactic actually works – pregnant children are the way forward.
Having said that, not even the knowledge that a four-year-old boy got knocked by a goat could make us watch Hollyoaks, so don't get any ideas Channel 4.
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