This week’s AUDIENCE MAP looks at the detailed demographics for the top programs from a variety of broadcast and cable networks this past Sunday. As a reminder, the audience shares for 30 distinct gender-age groups are displayed for each program below. Programs in the chart are ranked by network and by overall audience size.
Sunday night illustrates a number of different program strategies at once. At the top of course is The Walking Dead, a classic bona fide hit that does extremely well with a fairly broad spectrum of viewers: complete dominance with males 12-44 and very strong numbers with their female counterparts. Meanwhile, CBS and Disney Channel do a nice job serving very old and very young viewers (with Madam Secretary crushing it with women and men 65+ and K.C. Undercover and the rest of the Disney original Sunday line-up owning girls 6-14 and to some extent boys 6-11. Next, ABC, FOX and Bravo have a broader but less deep approach to assembling an audience coalition: Once Upon a Time does reasonably well with females 12-64, Last Man on Earth is more centered on males 12-39, and Real Housewives Atlanta has a core audience of women 21-49, though no micro-demographic group share for any of those shows moves into double-digits.
The other top cable programs on the night get increasingly niche: a narrower audience base and lower peak levels even with the core groups. Ax Men on History skews toward men 35+, Long Island Medium on TLC to women 30+, but none of those micro-demographics for those shows get much above a 3 share. But no high-profile Sunday program has a narrower base than Girls on HBO, with precisely two groups above a 2.0 share (women 21-24 and women 30-34) and two groups above a 1.5 share (men 25-29 and women 25-29). Just about every other group is near zero, with men 21-24 actually hitting the 0.0 share mark.
The chart below has the same shows and the same data — the only difference is the color shading. The peaks and valleys are colored on a show-by-show basis, rather than the chart above which looks at the highs and lows across the entire basket of programs.
Coming soon: we will compare Walking Dead to other cable dramas across a variety of networks.
Also, check out other AUDIENCE MAP posts.
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