For those of you who missed out on last night’s premiere of Greatest American Dog, surprisingly enough you just may have skipped out on what appears to be CBS’s biggest hit so far this summer! According to last night’s Nielsen ratings, not only was American Dog the highest ranked show on the network for the night…..it ranked higher than anything else that came on any network for the evening.

I caught the premiere episode and honestly I can see why 8.22 million others tuned in as well. The dogs were cute, the challenges were entertaining, and the pet owners themselves were quirky enough to catch my attention. I do have to admit though that I was caught off guard by a couple of things: 1) As a result of not winning the reward challenge one person is forced to sleep outside with their pet in a dog house (ok it was a little bigger than your average dog house, but still nobody likes sleeping on the floor next to their pooch.) 2) I really didn’t expect Michael and Ezzie to be sent home so soon. Maybe it’s because they were one of three pairs I profiled this week, but more so because Michael seemed to have the type of personality that screams reality television. Not that I’m saying reality T.V. is rigged, but it’s definitely not real.

Now comes the big question: How many of you will be returning for the second episode? My guess is that number will drop a bit, but after seeing a clip of next week’s show in which Bill is shown holding his purebred Brittany, Star,  and hearing it yelp as if it had been run over….well I just gotta make sure the pup is ok. So I guess I’m hooked for the time being. What did you guy’s think? Did last night’s episode live up to the hype or was it’s bark worse than it’s bite?