Weekly numbers, April 20-26: Draft rules everything around me

The Data Stream hit a small milestone this week, crossing the 50 subscriber mark. Sincere thanks to all of you who have signed up — it’s nice to know I’m not just typing to myself here. I’d love to keep growing that number, so if you’re enjoying it, tell people you know and share it on social media. I’d love to make this my full-time work someday, and with your help I might be able to get there.

Some news items before we get to the charts:

• The FCC is telling Disney it wants to do a barely precedented early review of broadcast licenses for the TV stations the company owns, ostensibly for a review of “unlawful discrimination” — i.e., having diversity and inclusion policies. That’s terrible on its own. The timing of the announcement, right after the president picked his latest fight with Jimmy Kimmel, makes it stink even more. Free speech advocates, the FCC’s sole Democratic member (two spots on what is supposed to be a five-person commission are vacant) and even Ted Freaking Cruz have all spoken out against the heavy handed move.

• In happier Disney-related news, ABC has picked up a second season of its Scrubs revival (and a third season of Tim Allen’s comedy Shifting Gears). The network hasn’t said anything about episode counts for next season yet, but I get the sense Scrubs will get more than the nine it had this season; when I talked to showrunner Aseem Batra for The Hollywood Reporter about the season finale, she mentioned hoping to get more time to spend with the show’s new characters, not just the returning stars.

• Laura Dern is joining the cast of The White Lotus after Helena Bonham Carter left a few days into filming season 4, due to creator Mike White rethinking the character he had in mind for Carter to play. White and Dern have collaborated a couple times before, including co-creating HBO’s Enlightened.

• The long-time-coming fourth season of Ted Lasso will premiere in August, with Jason Sudeikis’ character going back to London to coach the Richmond women’s squad.

Here are the network and cable ratings for last week, followed by streaming numbers for March 30-April 5.

*That’s a big number — and goes up to 13.2 million with digital and social platforms thrown in, according to ESPN — but not quite as big as last year’s 13.6 million for round one. The whole draft, including rounds 4-7 on Saturday, averaged 6.6 million viewers, off 12 percent year to year.

**The NBA number doesn’t include streaming of the Sixers/Celtics game on Peacock, which would probably put it at or a little above 6 million.

***This episode of NCIS had a guest appearance by ex-NCIS: LA star LL Cool J, who is set to lead yet another spinoff (NCIS: New York) on CBS next season. If you’re counting, that will be the eighth show with NCIS in its title and the ninth in the franchise that goes back to JAG in the mid-90s.

(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers. Weekend ones are noted by day.)

*This was the 10 p.m. ET hour Saturday, when news networks were covering the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the press conference that followed. This is way higher than the usual number for Fox News on a Saturday night — a week earlier, that same hour had 1.54 million viewers on the channel. CNN (2.48 million) and MS Now (1.47 million) were also a lot higher than usual.

**I have no idea what drove the CBS Saturday newscast this high, more than double what it was a week earlier. It aired a couple hours before the WHCD shooting, and the PGA Tour tournament CBS was broadcasting in the afternoon didn’t have nearly that big an audience. Weekend News had more viewers than any of the weeknight Evening News broadcasts.

*This is the first time The Pitt has been the overall No. 1 show or movie, for the week of its 13th episode of the season. It’s gone over a billion minutes of viewing 11 times in season 2 so far, with two episodes of Nielsen reporting to go.

**Crime 101, starring Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry, latest case of “bombed in theaters, did pretty well on streaming.” See also Anaconda, two spots down.

*An all-time high for the animated show from The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman.

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