Weekly numbers, April 27-May 3: Derby dominance — plus, give me your feedback

Before this week’s numbers, a couple things:

• Next week’s newsletters might look a little different. As I wrote about in last weekend’s newsletter, next week is upfronts week, when the big media companies preview the coming TV season and try to get advertisers to buy time on their networks and/or streaming services. It will be a hectic first half of the week — all the big presentations are happening Monday-Wednesday — and likely a lot of news will flow out of those.

• Because of that, I probably won’t do both a weekend long-read kind of newsletter and a Monday morning look-ahead. Instead, I’ll combine the two for Sunday and offer a somewhat more detailed upfronts preview and the usual rundown of premieres, finales and other TV events.

• I’ll be covering the upfronts a bunch in my day job with The Hollywood Reporter, but I’m curious if you’d be interested in receiving some of that news in your inbox as well. So, in the first ever Data Stream reader poll, let me know if you’d like a couple of extra newsletters in your inbox next week.

• And in the second ever Data Stream reader poll, I’d love to get your opinion about these weekly numbers newsletters. I’ve been sending them every Thursday evening, after both the network/cable ratings for the prior week and the newest batch of streaming ratings are all available. But the network and cable numbers usually arrive on Wednesdays, meaning that by the time this hits your inbox they’ve been floating around for 24 hours or so.

Thus, I’m curious if you, my wonderful subscribers, would be interested in getting two ratings-related newsletters weekly — one covering network and cable and one for streaming. If I split them in two, I’d probably offer a bit more in terms of numbers and the full streaming breakdowns that Nielsen sends.

Here’s that poll:

Thanks for your feedback — it will (I hope) help me make The Data Stream more of what you’d like. Here are the network and cable ratings for last week, followed by streaming numbers for April 6-12.

*The Sixers’ completion of their first-round upset Saturday yielded an all-time high for a first-round NBA playoff game 7 (including streaming on Peacock, the total was close to 11 million). The Cavs’ win over the Raptors had 7 million viewers including streaming. NBC’s regular season NBA games didn’t appreciably outdraw anyone else’s, but the early days of the playoffs have been big for the network.

**Last week’s Idol had a Taylor Swift theme, giving the show its biggest same-day audience in two months.

(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.)

*Including streaming, the hour of Kentucky Derby coverage surrounding the race had 19.6 million viewers — the biggest on record. From 7-7:15 p.m., when the actual race was being run, that ballooned to more than 24 million. NBC had hours of coverage leading up to Golden Tempo’s surprise win, broken up into several parts for Nielsen tracking purposes — but even that filler drew an audience several times bigger than a typical Saturday afternoon.

**Three game 7s in the first round of the playoffs probably helped juice ratings. The full first round averaged 4 million viewers across ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Prime Video, up 22 percent from last year on ABC/ESPN, TNT and NBA TV.

***Following the Derby and Sixers-Celtics, SNL drew its largest first-night audience of the season with host and musical guest Olivia Rodrigo.

*The total for The Boys’ premiere week is a good bit lower than its most recent season in 2024, which had 1.19 billion minutes of watch time for its opening week. Some of the drop might be down to Prime releasing two new episodes on premiere day, April 8, vs. three last time. Nielsen says about 64 percent of the total for The Boys was just for the two new episodes; the rest was for previous seasons.

**Shark movie!

*Big week for gleefully violent superhero shows on Prime.

**This is Dan Levy’s first series since Schitt’s Creek — he co-created and stars in Big Mistakes, about siblings (Levy and Taylor Ortega) who accidentally fall into organized crime. It got decent reviews, but that’s not an especially big premiere week number.

***Second time on the charts for Shrinking, this one coinciding with the show’s season 3 finale.

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