Stuck in the middle

Every week here, I put together charts of the top network and streaming shows, so you probably have a pretty good sense of what the biggest things on TV are: live sports and shows like CBS’ Tracker and Marshals on the network side.

But there is (of course) a lot more to TV than just the top 10 or 20 shows in a given week. By my count, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC aired a little more than 100 regular primetime series this past season, including weekly live sports telecasts and news programs like 60 Minutes, 20/20 and Dateline. Their audiences ranged from more than 20 million viewers (NBC’s Sunday Night Football) to fewer than 1 million (a couple things on Fox), not including streaming. I am purposely excluding The CW here, as they don’t do a lot of original programming anymore — and what there is, almost no one watches. Nothing on the network got to even 1 million viewers this season.

I’m also fascinated by shows that are squarely in the middle of their network’s ratings table. What does a perfectly average TV show look like, in terms of ratings? It’s that exercise I want to get into today.

I wish I could do the same for streaming shows, but the public data for streaming is generally limited to the top shows in a given week. Netflix has been releasing a big trove of data every six months for the past couple of years, so if that happens again in the next month or so, I’ll likely go looking for the midpoint there. For today, we’re going to look at the most average network primetime shows of the past season.

A quick note on how I got the numbers: I took the seven-day, non-streaming viewer totals for every primetime show on the big four networks and multiplied each show’s average by the number of episodes it aired last season (according to Nielsen), then added those totals and divided by the total number of episodes for a network to get the average (I could have gone more granular and used the total airtime to balance out half-hour and hour-long shows, but from experience, the episode count works fine.)

Nielsen’s broadcast rankings include non-primetime programs (which I filtered out) and stop at No. 200, so a handful of primetime shows fell below the cutoff. I have first-night ratings for everything, however, and in those cases I estimated how much more audience they got after a week. There’s unfortunately not enough streaming data for shows further down the rankings to do calculations with all-in viewing numbers — but based on what I have seen, the shows in the middle would probably still be in the middle, just with larger audiences.

Below are the most middling shows, ratings-wise, of the 2025-26 network season.

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Here are the average audiences for each network’s regular primetime lineup, with and without sports. CBS’ average is the same for both, as it didn’t have any regular primetime sports telecasts, and Fox’s non-sports average is a little higher because some of its primetime sports offerings, notably the United Football League in the spring, didn’t bring in many viewers. (These numbers are also not the full, all-in season averages, which you can see here. Those include one-off sports telecasts, Winter Olympics primetime coverage for NBC, and specials and movies.)

*Since not every network aired the same number of shows, the all-network average isn’t just the sum of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC’s average divided by four.

• ABC’s most average show relative to all of its primetime programming is 911: Nashville, which averaged 4.75 million viewers before streaming. If we factor out sports, the most average ABC series is America’s Funniest Home Videos, which drew 4.12 million viewers a week.

• On CBS, the series closest to the network average is Elsbeth, the Good Wife spinoff starring Carrie Preston as a lawyer-turned-police consultant who has a Columbo-esque knack for figuring out whodunit. It had about 6.02 million viewers per episode.

• The most average Fox series relative to all programs is the Joel McHale-hosted game show The 1% Club, which is right on the network median of 2.12 million viewers. If you factor out sports, the closest to the average is, ironically, a sports program: Fox Saturday Baseball drew 2.16 million people each week.

• On NBC, the Monday edition of The Voice drew 4.86 million viewers last season, closest to the all-show average of 5.07 million. Excluding sports, Law & Order is the closest to the middle with a smidge under 4.8 million viewers.

• And for all four networks, I’ve partly spoiled the most average show in primetime with the header photo. Including sports, the final season of The Neighborhood on CBS (just under 4.5 million viewers) came within about 14,000 people of the all network average. Taking away sports, it’s another CBS show: Watson, the Sherlock Holmes-adjacent medical drama that was canceled at the end of the season. The CBS show had 4.49 million viewers, 120,000 or somore than the non-sports average of 4.37 million.

So that list includes five procedural dramas, a traditional multi-camera sitcom, a game show, a video clip show and a weekly baseball telecast as the median shows for their respective networks and all of broadcast TV. So, well done viewers, I guess — you seem to have a pretty good idea of what a typical network series is.

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