Snowboarders boost NBC to weekly ratings win

LOS ANGELES — The aerial wizardry of snowboarders Shaun White and Chloe Kim lifted the Winter Olympics and NBC to a weekly ratings victory.

Veteran White’s goldmedal comeback in the halfpipe gave NBC the mostwatched night in prime-time last week, according to Nielsen ratings released Wednesday.

Kim’s unprecedented combination of spins for a woman in competition captured gold for her and delivered almost as many viewers as tuned in the night of White’s performance.

Altogether, Olympic broadcasts from Pyeongchang, South Korea, claimed seven of the week’s top 10 slots. In 8th place was CBS’ “60 Minutes” featuring Oprah Winfrey’s second round-table with Michigan voters, including supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump.

For the week of Feb. 12-18, NBC averaged 17.62 million viewers. That bested the combined viewership of the three other major broadcast networks by the largest margin for any regular season, non-Super Bowl week since electronic “people meters” came into use, the network said.

CBS was second with 4.48 million viewers, followed by Fox with 1.65 million, Univision with 1.43 million, ION Television with 1.3 million, Telemundo with 1.18 million and the CW with 930,000.

Fox News Channel was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.23 million viewers in prime time. TNT had 2.4 million, MSNBC had 1.72 million, USA had 1.44 million and HGTV had 1.23 million.