Weekly numbers, April 13-19: Roundball rockin'

The thing with weekly ratings, especially this time of year, is that they tend not to change very much. So for like the sixth or seventh week in a row, CBS shows Tracker and Marshals are the top two series — they’ve been trading off first and second — and other things settle in below. But it’s boring writing that headline every week, so I look for other things that might be of interest.

This week, it’s the start of the NBA Playoffs. The first two days of games on ABC, NBC/Peacock and Prime Video all did pretty well (as did the play-in round on Prime earlier last week). Collectively, the eight games on April 18 and 19 averaged 4.3 million viewers, in line with last year’s opening weekend (4.4 million).

Not included in any of the charts below because it has a couple extra days of viewing rolled into it, but Euphoria’s second episode pulled in another big audience on HBO Max (and a little on HBO cable). Over three days, the episode matched the season premiere total of 8.5 million viewers.

A few other news items from the past couple days:

• Dancing With the Stars was renewed for the 2026-27 season on ABC — no surprise after a crazy-good ratings run last fall. A spinoff series that will find the next pro dancer for the show will air in the summer.

• Netflix is, for some reason, developing a show based on The Nanny Diaries, whose 2007 movie adaptation wasn’t very successful. Scarlett Johansson, who starred in that movie, is among the producers for the series take.

• Please enjoy the logline for a comedy series starring Elizabeth Banks that Apple TV just greenlit: “Fresh off a messy divorce, Heidi (Banks) sets out to secure a lively second act for herself and her kids. But when she stumbles into coordinating her father’s retirement community sex dates, Heidi is forced into an unlikely alliance with his girlfriend’s perpetually single son.” (Emphasis mine)

Here are the network charts for last week, followed by streaming numbers for March 23-29:

*The Peacock portion of both NBC playoff games is significant — just under a million viewers for the Blazers/Spurs game and 750,000 or so for Magic/Pistons. That’s 15 to 20 percent of the total audience for each game.

**NBC last had NBA rights in 2002 — when Survivor was two years old. Jeff Probst’s grandchild may end up hosting it someday.

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

*As usual, pretty good week for ABC News.

**For the first time since I started doing this newsletter, we get to Matlock.

*This is a Tyler Perry show, and it was actually down a little from the week before, when it finished second overall. But it was a relatively light week for streamers, so Beauty in Black moved up.

**The Pitt, meanwhile, was 100,000 minutes shy of its all-time weekly high (1.209 billion minutes) for the week its 12th episode premiered.

***To paraphrase George Costanza, why did people watch this badly reviewed remake? Because it was on Netflix.

*Executive produced (but not created by) the Duffer brothers, Something Very Bad had a pretty soft premiere for a Netflix show. It is very much not Stranger Things.

**This show is on the charts for the first time in four years, thanks to the follow-up movie Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man premiering on Netflix earlier in March.

Thanks for reading. Tell your friends about The Data Stream, and please consider upgrading to a paid subscription — it’s just $7 a month, or (through June 30) a discounted $60 for an annual sub ($75 after that).