Nielsen Ratings Thu, Mar 27: NBC Bests NCAA

March 28th, 2008 by Robert Seidman  Email This

Scoreboard for Thurs. March 27, 2008
Total Viewers (million)	11.78	9.75	8.66	5.96	3.30
Rating/Share: Adults 18-49	4.0/11	3.8/10	2.8/8	1.9/5	1.4/4

With its lineup of Deal or No Deal and the two hour Celebrity Apprentice finale, NBC averaged over two million more people than CBS and also eked out the win in the 18-49 demographic.

FOX ran with the seemingly waning Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? along with Don’t Forget the Lyrics and landed in third for the night in both viewers and the 18-49 demo.  Without a new episode of LOST, ABC landed in last place (or next to last, if you count the CW).  I’ve been catching up on Eli Stone, and it’s a cute show although according to Marc Berman it suffered series low ratings. 

But I’ll point something out that Berman didn’t.  Eli has a fairly healthy DVR following and in the most recent data available, more than 70% of the DVR viewing comes after the night the show airs (the numbers we report here would include any DVR viewing up to 3am this morning).  So Eli might have another 900K to one million extra viewers when the LIVE+7 data is released.  Added to the 6.52 million LIVE+SD viewers I don’t think those are awful 10pm numbers these days - especially for ABC.  And you can pretty much count on that practically all the DVR viewers are in the 18-49 demo, where the LIVE+SD was a weak 1.9/5

While I don’t want to believe the numbers, I won’t cry a Nielsen conspiracy like some people (cough), but to be honest I’m more surprised about the popularity of Celebrity Apprentice than that it beat NCAA action.  CBS averaged 9.75 million people and a 3.8/10 in the demo for the primetime portion of its NCAA coverage.  Of the four games played last night, two wound up being more or less blow outs (Louisville and Rick Pitino putting the beatdown on Tennessee and Bruce Pearl, and North Carolina beat up on Washington State University). Of the other two games one was so close that Xavier needed overtime to beat West Virginia, and UCLA had some difficulty at times with Western Kentucky.  Of course nobody has ever heard of Western Kentucky so that probably wasn’t a ratings boon. 

I will talk about the CW here for a couple of reasons - CW seemingly only cares about women 18-34 at this point.  Its exiting from Friday Night Smackdown! which will move to MyNetworkTV, but Smallville with 3.84 million drew more viewers than America’s Next Top Model did last night (3.84 million vs. 3.5 million).  However, I don’t think CW really cares about that because Smallville performed slightly worse in the 18-49 (it had a 1.5/5 to ANTM’s 1.7/5) and I’m sure if I had access to the women 18-34 data, ANTM did better. 

Reaper was in the 9pm slot normally occupied by Supernatural,  and pulled in 2.76 million.  That’s slightly worse than the typical Supernatural performance  but more or less in the same ballpark.  Yesterday I watched the pilot for Reaper along with one other episode and really enjoyed it.  It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be, and the pilot was funny as hell (no pun intended).  I’ll watch a few more episodes and write about Reaper in a separate post sometime soon.

Thursday night’s full details:

Nielsen Ratings Source: Nielsen Media Research. Full night’s results available via Marc Berman/Mediaweek.