‘60 Minutes’ tops holiday week shows
are the combined rankings for national prime-time network and cable television last week (July 2-8), as compiled by Nielsen. They are based on the average number of people who watched a program from start to finish during its scheduled telecast or on a playback device the same day. Nielsen estimates there are 289 million potential viewers in the U.S. ages 2 and older. Viewership is listed in millions.
With NBC airing a rerun of perennial summer ratings leader “America’s Got Talent” because of the customarily lower television viewership on Independence Day eve, “60 Minutes” edged “Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular” to be the week’s most-watched prime-time program.
The Sunday broadcast of the CBS news magazine with three previously aired stories averaged 7.45 million viewers, according to liveplus-same-day figures released by Nielsen on Tuesday.
“Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular” on NBC was the only other primetime program to average more than 7 million viewers between July 2 and Sunday, averaging 7.41 million viewers, its largest audience since 2012. Viewership was up 16.4% over last year’s broadcast that averaged 6.36 million viewers.
The Thursday and Sunday “Big Brother” broadcasts on CBS were the week’s two most-watched prime-time programs among viewers ages 18 to 49, averaging 1.75 million and 1.68 million viewers among the group targeted by ABC, NBC and Fox and coveted by advertisers.
ABC’s “The Bachelorette” was third among the group, averaging 1.59 million viewers.
The 2-3 finish by “Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular” and “Little Big Shots” helped NBC to its first weekly victory among total viewers since Feb. 1925, when its programming for ratings purposes consisted entirely of the Olympics-related programming except for an episode of the comedy “A.P. Bio” after the closing ceremony.
NBC averaged 4.12 million viewers for the week. CBS was second, averaging 4.01 million after three consecutive first-place finishes.
ABC averaged 3.14 million viewers to finish third for the fourth consecutive week after back-to-back victories when it aired the NBA Finals.
Fox finished fourth among the major broadcast networks for the 24th consecutive week, averaging 1.58 million viewers for its 15 hours, 42 minutes of primetime programming. Its most-watched program was a rerun of the procedural drama “9-1-1,” which was 69th for the week, averaging 2.29 million viewers.
NBC, CBS and NBC all had 22 hours of programming for ratings purposes.
The week’s mostwatched cable program was History’s “Evel Live,” in which Travis Pastrana successfully attempted three of the late daredevil Evel Knievel’s most dangerous stunts. The three-hour program broadcast live from Las Vegas averaged 3.48 million viewers, 30th overall.
Fox News Channel was the most-watched cable network for the fifth consecutive week, averaging 1.97 million viewers. HGTV was second, averaging 1.38 million and USA Network third, averaging 1.33 million.
Fox’s pre-prime-time coverage of Saturday’s 2018 FIFA World Cup quarterfinals averaged 5.66 million.