Off prime, but not sub-prime

I’ve been watching the World Cup a bunch the past couple of weeks, but I don’t really care for the pre- and between-game studio shows. That’s not a dig particularly at Fox’s production — though there are plenty of them out there — so much as a personal thing. I don’t really watch pregame shows for any sports. (I also don’t speak Spanish well enough to comment on Telemundo’s studio programming.)

But it does leave me with some time to kill, and if I don’t just turn off the TV (or close the Hulu app on my phone) outright, I have channel surfed and ended up on Jeopardy! a couple of times. I’m not a regular viewer of it anymore, but its consistency over what’s now 40-plus years since the first Alex Trebek-hosted season in the 1980s is pretty remarkable.

Having written about ratings for a long time, I also know that Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud draw pretty big audiences day in and day out in syndication. I then started to wonder how they’d stack up against primetime network shows — and also how the larger set of non-primetime shows stacks up against what does air in prime.

The answer in both cases is: really quite well, especially if you include sports in the rankings.

For this weekend’s data dive, I’m looking at the biggest non-primetime shows of the 2025-26 season and where they fit in the overall network rankings.

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First, the Jeopardy!/syndication question. Nielsen’s syndicated ratings run a couple weeks behind the network and cable charts, so plugging in the top syndicated shows means having to go back in time a couple of weeks. So let’s do that.

Here’s what the top 10 shows in the full-day network and cable ratings looked like for the week of June 1-7.

Syndicated ratings for that week are now available too. Adding those into the mix makes the top 10 look like this. The changes are italicized.

Other than the two NBA Finals games, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune were the most watched shows of the week, and Family Feud and Judge Judy — which, by the way, has been in reruns for four-plus years — also make the top 10. Jeopardy!, Wheel and Family Feud would likely make the top 10 or 15 shows in just about any week of the year, not just during the summer when network numbers go down some.

Having done that for a single week, I decided to look back at ratings for the full season and see both what the top non-primetime shows were and where they ranked among all regular broadcast programming for this past season. Fortunately, Nielsen sends a running average of the top 200 network shows for the season, regardless of when they air, each week.

They do not do that for cable or syndication, unfortunately, but I had about 10 weeks’ worth of syndication numbers saved so I could make a decent estimate for season-long averages for Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and the like. I took out sports pre- and post-game shows and repeats. Here are the top 20 non-primetime shows of this past season, along with their ranking among all broadcast series.

*Syndicated show averages are estimates.

No surprise that CBS and Fox’s late afternoon NFL games are the biggest things on TV — that’s been the case for a number of years. They outdraw NBC’s primetime Sunday Night Football, which finished third overall last season. The early afternoon Sunday games are fourth and fifth.

Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud are all in the top 20 overall (and easily outdraw the primetime, celebrity versions of the game that all run on ABC). ABC and NBC’s evening newscasts — regulars in the network and cable top 20s — make the top 25, and Saturday Night Live is 28th (and goes higher with streaming). CBS Sunday Morning, the most easygoing news program on all of TV, and the second half of The Price Is Right also get bigger audiences than a good number of primetime series.

Farther down, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert finished No. 1 in late night viewers with 2.88 million viewers for its final season, 106th overall. Jimmy Kimmel Live was 15 spots back at 2.57 million viewers; NBC’s Tonight Show and Late Night are out of the top 200.

The Young and the Restless, which has been on for 50-some years, was the top daytime soap with 3.29 million viewers, good for 83rd place. ABC’s General Hospital gets 2.18 million.

What all that says to me is that even in a TV business where streaming makes up almost half of the time we spend watching, network viewing is still a pretty deeply ingrained habit. Just about all of the top non-primetime shows have been on the air in some form for a very long time (and most of their viewers almost certainly grew up well before streaming was a thing). Streamers are trying to crash the non-primetime market now by bulking up on video podcasts and other laundry-folding kinds of shows, and there’s no question broadcast TV is, as a whole, in a years-long decline. But some of these shows might be what keeps it hanging on.

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