Fox’s World Series win
The network pulls ahead despite a viewership low for the first five games.
Viewership for the first five games of the World Series set a record low, but each of the first three games averaged more viewers than all but three non-NFL primetime programs during the 2019-20 television season.
Fox’s coverage of the series between the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals averaged 11.64 million viewers, helping Fox to have the most-watched week by any network since the Super Bowl, according to live-plussame-day figures announced Tuesday by Nielsen.
The previous low for the first five games of a World Series was 12.12 million for the 2014 Series between San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals.
Washington’s 5-4 Game 1 victory over Houston on Oct. 22 was the most-watched of the opening five games, averaging 12.3 million viewers, third among prime-time programs airing between Oct. 21 and Sunday.
The Astros’ 4-1 victory in Game 3 Friday was fourth for the week, averaging 12.22 million viewers. The Nationals’ 12-3 victory Oct. 23 averaged the smallest audience for a World Series Game 2, 12.01 million viewers, but was still fifth for the week.
Since the 2019-20 primetime TV season began Sept. 23, other than NFL programming, only the Sept. 24 and Oct. 1 episodes of the CBS action drama “NCIS” (12.58 million and 12.52 million) and the Oct. 13 episode of the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes” (12.41 million) averaged larger audiences than any of the first three games.
Houston’s 8-1 victory in Game 4 averaged 10.22 million viewers, to be Saturday’s most-watched prime-time program and 11th for the week. The Astros’ 7-1 victory in Game 5 opposite NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was seventh for the week, averaging 11.39 million viewers. The World Series has aired on Fox every year since 2000.
Viewership for most forms of programming is down compared with the past primarily because of higher viewership of streaming programming, including the same programs shown on traditional television.
With all but two of its 21 hours of prime-time programming devoted to sports, Fox averaged 10.94 million viewers for the week, the most for any network since CBS averaged 20.91 million viewers between Jan. 28-Feb. 3 when it aired Super Bowl LIII. CBS was second, averaging 6.54 million viewers, aided by the 41-minute runover of its afternoon NFL coverage into prime time in the Eastern and Central time zones that averaged 22.71 million viewers. The run-over is not considered a separate program but is included in the weekly average.
NBC was third, averaging 6.45 million, followed by ABC, which averaged 4.3 million. ABC was the only major broadcast network without prime-time NFL programming.