Weekly Numbers, March 30-April 5: A few shining moments (and 'Tracker')

We’re getting to the point of the year where there’s not much week to week change in the primetime top 10. CBS’ Sunday shows, Tracker and Marshals, have been trading off the top spot — at least when a big sports lead-in doesn’t push 60 Minutes to the top.

This week’s top 10 is also sports-free, because the NCAA men’s Final Four aired on TBS and TNT this year (it trades off with CBS every other year) and the women’s games were on ESPN, while the final on ABC and ESPN had an afternoon slot.

So the interesting stuff (to me at least) is in the second chart below, which shows the combined cable and network top 20 for every part of the day. Tracker is up at the top of the post rather than the Finals Four because I don’t have access to wire service photos.

The most recent streaming charts, for March 9-15, are also at the end of the post. Since the No. 1 overall spot went to a movie this time, I included the rest of the top 10 movies too. Also, the movie list tends to be a hodgepodge of new releases and random stuff that was added to Netflix that week, which is the case here too.

*The over/under on how long this show will run and be among the top series on network TV is, oh, 10.5 seasons.

**One of the reasons this show still does so well is that is has the Sunday World News Tonight as a lead-in (see the next chart).

(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight broadcasts. Weekend ones are noted by day)

*This is an approximate number as I couldn’t find the TruTV number — but the two games combined averaged 14.2 million viewers so it’s got to be within a couple hundred thousand viewers.

**Although the game was never close — UCLA ran way with a 79-51 win — it was up about 16 percent from last year (also a blowout). It was the third most-watched women’s final on record, behind only the 2024 and 2023 games.

***As mentioned in the primetime only chart, World News Tonight Sunday usually offers a big lead-in to America’s Funniest Home Videos.

*Zootopia 2 was huge at the box office, and its first week streaming was huge too.

**If you want a show based on a long-running, best-selling series of novels, Prime Video is your streaming service. Scarpetta (based on Patricia Cornwell’s books) follows Jack Ryan, Bosch, Reacher, Cross …

*It’s darkly funny to me that both of these movies charted the same week. Also, that’s a pretty soft performance for Melania in its first week. Most movies that start there fall out of the top 10 after a week or two

*KPop Demon Hunters hit Netflix nine months ago. It has made the top 10 movies in 37 of the last 39 weeks, only falling off over the holidays when Christmas movies dominated the top 10.

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