Rachel Maddow, Mary Trump make formidable TV combination

NEW YORK—NOT only can President Donald J. Trump’s niece Mary sell books, she can draw a crowd on television. Her one-hour interview with Rachel Maddow on Thursday reached 5.2 million people, the biggest audience ever for one of Maddow’s shows and largest ever for a regularlyscheduled show on MSNBC, the Nielsen company said.

That’s not bad for July, when television audiences are generally the smallest of the year.

Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man approached 1 million units sold on preorders alone. First-week sales figures are due later this week.

Mary Trump also drew a crowd to CNN on Friday, where she was interviewed by Chris Cuomo during the 8 and 9 pm Eastern hours, though not to the level as Maddow’s audience. Cuomo’s first-hour audience of 2.19 million was up 28 percent from the year’s average, while the second hour’s 2.66 million was up 39 percent, Nielsen said.

CBS won the week in prime time, averaging 3.2 million viewers. NBC had 3 million, ABC had 2.8 million, Univision had 1.4 million, Fox had 1.3 million, ION Television reached 1.1 million and Telemundo had 820,000.

Fox News Channel led the cable networks with an average of 2.94 million viewers in prime time. MSNBC was second with 2.03 million, CNN had 1.59 million, HGTV had 1.29 million and TLC had 1.26 million.

ABC’S World News Tonight led the evening news networks with an average of 8.9 million viewers. NBC’S Nightly News had 7.6 million and the CBS Evening News had 5.2 million.