In the fourth week of the 2008-9 broadcast prime-time season, CBS again had the largest audience and the most adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 for the week of October 13-20. Fox edged a tightly packed group of NBC, ABC and CBS for the most adults 18-34 for the week.
CBS’s average viewership of 11.47 million beat ABC by over two million viewers. NBC with 7.21 million and Fox with 6.73 million were well behind. For demo adults 18-49 it was CBS over ABC by 4.18 million to 3.64 million with NBC (3.50 million) and Fox (3.29 million) trailing. For adults 25-54 it was again CBS over ABC by 5.08 million to 4.12 million viewers, with NBC third (3.75 million) and Fox (3.2 million) fourth. In adults 18-34, Fox edged NBC by a mere 80,000, winning with 1.63 million to 1.55 million, ABC finished a close third with 1.48 million and CBS nearby with 1.41 million.
Univision was fifth across the board, and the CW was sixth across the board, typical of last season. New this week are the averages for MyNetworkTV, the new home of Friday Night Smackdown!. Note that its results are closer to the CW’s than the CW’s are to the rest of the English networks.
(click chart for full sized image)
Nielsen TV Ratings Data: ©2008 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.
semi interesting tidbit via NBC:
Through the first four weeks of the 2008-09 season, NBC is now the “second youngest” of the major broadcast networks, with a median age of 45.6, only 1.1 years “older” than Fox (44.5). By comparison, CBS’s median age is 52.9 and ABC’s median age is 50.7.
Well, they’ve lost half their viewers, but apparently it was the old half…
CW is really being hurt by that MRC lineup on Sundays. Fridays aren’t working great, but under a million viewers for all three of those hours is really making it seem like the netlet is failing more than it actually is. I remember looking at the year-to-year comparisons for the CW before the MRC block premiered and it was looking really good in comparison. Then the Sunday block comes along and *BOOM*
Travis, good to see you here. Indeed, Mon-Wed is going as good or better than last year for the CW, Thursday’s about the same, but Friday and Sunday are just killing them.
I do wish CW would consider sending Reaper to Fridays to stabalize the night. Air it with 13 and they’d have a great night of horror and two nights in a row featuring genre television. It makes sense to me. Then CW can do what they should have done in the beginning, air the comedies on Wednesday with the much more compatible ANTM.
At least this way the erosion wouldn’t look so bad…besides, Reaper might be able to grow on Fridays…there’s very little competition there.
Hey Robert,
I agree that NBC has the second youngest age medium from the major networks but that means very little when it comes to the weekly or the end of year rankings.
NBC needs to introduce a couple of mainstream shows in order to attract the average viewer.
Their production slate is just pathetic.
Harry, I completely agree, the data isn’t very meaningful, but the relative median ages are interesting (at least to me). But when your #of average viewers is very low, how young they are isn’t of great importance.
Travis, though the Sunday night performance is worse than last year, the MRC shows are much closer to last year’s numbers than Friday nights without Smackdown are.