LOS ANGELES — At home here on Saturday afternoon, Paul Telegdy, who heads up reality programming for NBC, directed his Web browser to a real-time search engine of Twitter messages and checked in on “The Voice,” the Tuesday night singing competition that is his network’s strongest new entry in several years.
There were dozens of Twitter messages each minute from viewers about “The Voice.” “Hey, what’s going on?” he wondered. Then he remembered: the E! channel, an NBC Universal sibling, was running a marathon of the season to date.
“I was sort of overwhelmed by how much interactivity there was,” Mr. Telegdy said the next day, again refreshing the search engine. (“You have to be careful you don’t check every five seconds,” he added.)
Helped along by online chitchat, cable marathons and a cast of four celebrity coaches, “The Voice” is in the midst of a crescendo, as this Tuesday’s show starts a climactic period of live broadcasts and live rejections of contestants. The show, which had its premiere at the end of April, is averaging about 12.9 million viewers, and, more important for NBC, about 7.35 million of them are between the ages of 18 to 49, making it the No. 1 new series of the television season with that group.
