Not even the NBA Finals could hold its own this low-watched summer. ABC:  Thanks to the NBA FINALS GAME 1, ABC was up 267% for the night versus the same Thursday last year, but that’s apples and oranges.  A more meaningful comparison is Thursday, June 14, 2012, which also featured an NBA Finals game.  Last […]

  Low returns for the CBS line-up. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary live+same day key advertiser demographics (adult 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 ratings), audience skews (women 18-49, men 18-49 and adults 50+ shares) and total viewership (thousands of people over the age of 2). Ratings analysis follows […]

  Summer:  when the network airing reruns beats all the networks with new programming. CBS:  BIG BROTHER was the highest rated show of the night with a preliminary 1.9 (starting 20 minutes late, like the rest of the network’s line-up, due to a golf overrun), but the reruns afterward were so low that the network […]

The weekly network ratings in prime time (now based on seven days of official nationals) are final, with substantial downward revisions from our estimate yesterday. The Saturday fast national ratings were vastly overstated because of continued local coverage of NFL preseason games in a handful of markets, and that was enough to inflate the weekly […]

Wednesday ratings for last night, last year and last week.  Night 3 of Million Second Quiz slumped to a 1.2 adult 18-49 rating (three night track: 1.7…1.5…1.2), as its competition got significantly stiffer (the early premiere of The X Factor on FOX with a 2.1 and time period leader Big Brother on CBS with a […]

  It was a bad night on the networks to be anything but sports.  Note:  the football and baseball numbers below are adjusted to estimate where the final numbers will be after western time zones are taken into account tomorrow. ABC:  ONCE UPON A TIME proved once and for all that Disney doesn’t interfere with […]

  This was the first Wednesday in a while not to feature special circumstances (World Series games, the CMAs), and things returned pretty much to normal. ABC:  All the network’s shows were within 0.1 of their last regular airings.  THE MIDDLE rose 0.1 to 2.3, BACK IN THE GAME was similarly up to 1.8, MODERN […]

  Vintage TV beat vintage Hollywood on a very slow night. CBS:  It doesn’t say much to be “#1 for the night” when the result is a 1.4 rating, but the colorized I LOVE LUCY HOLIDAY SPECIAL can claim that honor.  (In the older-skewing total viewers metric, Lucy was CBS’s least-watched show of the night.) […]