New TV season has budding hits
Promising starts for “Good Doctor,” “Will & Grace,” “Sheldon”
The young 2017-18 TV season shows at least early signs of potential hits.
ABC’s The Good Doctor, a medical series about a young surgical resident (Freddie Highmore) with autism, opened with 11.4 million viewers Sept. 25, jumping by nearly 3 million from its Dancing With the Stars lead-in. In its second week, Doctor held steady, another good sign.
CBS comedy Young Sheldon, a Big Bang Theory spinoff, claimed 17.2 million same-day viewers in its debut on Sept. 25, the first night of the season, ranking No. 2 for the week behind Big Bang’s 17.7 million. ( Sheldon’s endurance won’t be tested until Nov. 2, when it moves, along with Big Bang, to Thursdays.)
And NBC had at least some early good news with the reviv- al of Will & Grace as 10.2 million fans tuned in to watch the foursome reunite 11 years after the show left the air.
It’s tough to make judgments about new shows after one week: Viewers tend to surf around and sample them, with no guarantee they’ll come back. Several had yet to premiere.
But a large early crowd is better than the alternative, which is where shows including ABC’s Ten Days in the Valley (3.4 million), Marvel’s Inhumans (3.7 million) and NBC’s The Brave (6 million, just over half of its Voice lead-in) found themselves. And after a strong Sunday start, Fox’s The Orville is tanking on Thursdays, with 3.7 million last week.
Apart from This Is Us and The Big Bang Theory, which rose 12% from last season’s opener thanks to a big marriage-proposal cliffhanger, other returning shows weren’t so lucky. CBS’ Bull, one of last fall’s biggest newcomers, plunged 35% to a same-day audience of 10.1 million, and Fox’s Empire dropped 38%, to 7.1 million.
Still, same-day ratings represent an increasingly smaller por- tion of the total viewership: Half of NBC’s audience for entertainment programs now comes from online, on-demand or delayed viewing. With just three days of delayed viewing counted, Will & Grace’s return jumped 45% to
14.8 million, and This Is Us climbed 38% from a record-high
12.9 million to 17.8 million, which likely will make it last week’s top drama, eclipsing NCIS.
In late-night, NBC’s Saturday Night Live drew 7.1 million viewers, down from last year’s 8.3 million, but otherwise marked its biggest opener since 2008.