Weekly numbers: Sports section

My apologies for whiffing on separate on-air and streaming posts for this week — I was mesmerized by the Knicks comeback/Spurs collapse Wednesday night and didn’t realize my mistake until this morning. I figured better just to wait and do a single newsletter than double up in a single day.

Spoiler for the charts below: They’re going to be rather sports-heavy. The NBA Finals and the NHL’s Stanley Cup final pulled in their best early-series numbers since pre-pandemic years (and a further spoiler for next week, game 3 of the NBA series had 1990s-esque ratings).

A few other pieces of TV and streaming news from the past couple days:

• Apple TV has renewed its word-of-mouth hit Widow’s Bay for a second season. I am sorely behind on this one, but the little I’ve seen so far I like quite a bit. Also, my Hollywood Reporter colleague David Canfield has a great making-of feature about the show. Creator Katie Dippold has had Widow’s Bay in her head for a long time — so long that she used an early version of the pilot as a spec script when she was trying to get hired on Parks and Recreation.

• Levon Hawke — younger brother of Maya, son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman — has been cast in season 2 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which will apparently have multiple Smiths running around. The show has gone through a bunch of behind-the-scenes changes since season one (which are sketched out in the linked story) and I get the sense the next season will be considerably different than the first. I’m really curious to see how it ends up looking.

• Season 6 of Slow Horses will premiere on Apple TV Sept. 16. The season will pull in pieces from two of Mick Herron’s source material novels, Joe Country and Slough House.

On to the numbers — network and cable ratings for June 1-7 and streaming top 10s for May 11-17.

“R” stands for rerun.

*Through its first two games, the NBA Finals were at their highest audience levels since 2018, the last of the four straight Warriors-Cavaliers series. The Stanley Cup final, meanwhile, is at its highest level through three games since 2015, when they were on NBC.

**The Tony Awards were basically even with last year’s 5.1 million viewers. A revival of Death of a Salesman, Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys and a Ragtime revival were the biggest winners.

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(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers but not including holidays. Weekend newscasts are noted by day.)

*When your daytime game show is getting as many or more viewers than your evening newscast, that’s … maybe not ideal for the newscast.

*Big week for specials and movies on Netflix, though the Kevin Hart roast wasn’t quite as big as the one for Tom Brady two years ago. And did you have any idea that GOAT, the Steph Curry-inspired animated movie about a hoops-playing goat, made almost $195 million worldwide at the box office earlier this year? I did not.

**Pretty good start for this show from Power creator Courtney A. Kemp, though she moved her overall deal from Netflix to Apple TV a week after Nemesis premiered.

*Decent premieres also for these two very different shows: Dutton Ranch is a Yellowstone spinoff, and Off Campus is Prime’s take on the hockey romance. Dutton will probably be sticking around in the rankings for a bit since it’s a weekly release after the first two.

**M.I.A. is a revenge drama that got very little advance hype, from what I was able to tell, but has made the top 10 originals twice in a row.

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