Weekly on-air numbers: It's all sports

I filed a story for The Hollywood Reporter today (it will run tomorrow morning) breaking down the big ratings for the NBA Finals, the NHL’s Stanley Cup Final and the start of the World Cup. This newsletter is a variation on that theme — the sports are huge right now.

In the total-day ratings (the second chart below), 18 of the top 20 shows last week were sports telecasts: three NBA Finals games, two Stanley Cup contests and 13(!) World Cup telecasts between Fox and Telemundo/Peacock. The mood going into the first North American men’s World Cup since 1994 was horrible, but once the games started the corrupt as hell FIFA and the enshittifying current U.S. administration have been pushed aside for some very fun on-field action and good vibes among visiting fan bases and the host cities.

Outside of Olympic years, this is going to be the biggest sports summer in a looong time. I’m thrilled to have some more stuff to watch in what’s usually a relatively quiet part of the sports calendar, and the networks and streamers airing all these games are thrilled to have a bunch of eyeballs on them that they probably otherwise wouldn’t.

The top network and cable shows for last week are below; streaming ratings will follow in a separate newsletter tomorrow evening.

*The NBA Finals as a whole averaged 20.6 million viewers, the most since 1998 — Michael Jordan’s last championship with the Bulls.

**I’m separating the Fox and Telemundo/Peacock broadcasts here so you can see just how big the World Cup is for both; the Spanish-language broadcasts actually outdrew Fox and FS1’s English-language telecasts through Sunday. Also, if you combined the audience for the U.S.-Paraguay game — a group stage match, the equivalent of the first round of the playoffs — it would rank ahead of the clinching game of the NBA Finals. Obviously the World Cup being in North America helps a ton, but “soccer outdraws the NBA” would have been an absurd statement in pretty much all of American TV history before this year.

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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.)

*I mean, look at some of these numbers! 20 million-plus combined for Mexico/South Africa and Brazil/Morocco, 17 million-plus for Netherlands/Japan. Twelve damn million viewers for Haiti/Scotland, two teams not even really expected to get out of the group stage. NBCUniversal says streaming on Peacock and Telemundo’s digital platforms accounts for a third of the total audience through their first 12 telecasts. That’s a huge percentage, well beyond what Peacock delivered for the NBA (around 20-22 percent of the total audience, including playoffs) and NFL (12 percent during the regular season) this year.

**BTW, the Stanley Cup Final had its best average (about 5.2 million over six games) since 2019.

*These two shows have each been on approximately forever.

**Big Bang is the most watched sitcom in syndication by a pretty wide margin. Still kicking at 27th place on the weekday charts (and 51st including weekend-only shows) is, believe it or not, Seinfeld. It drew 662,000 daily viewers during this week.

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