Weekly numbers, April 6-12: Wolverines, Masters and astronauts

The end of the college basketball season and the first big golf tournament of the year were two of the biggest things on TV last week — but the end of the longest crewed space flight ever topped them all.

It wasn’t anything like the Apollo 11 moon landing in terms of “literally almost everyone is watching it,” but the return of Artemis II after its crew broke the Apollo 13 record for farthest distance a human had ever traveled from Earth was pretty darn cool. And it brought in a big audience.

Not in the charts below because it happened over three days, but Euphoria also had a big return to HBO and (mostly) HBO Max with 8.5 million viewers. About 96 percent of that total came after the first on-air showing, which came in at 356,000. HBO shows usually get a pretty big majority of their viewers from streaming now, and Euphoria’s target audience isn’t all that likely to have a cable subscription, but that’s still a pretty wild disparity.

A couple quick bits of TV news:

• CBS announced its schedule for next season — no Ghosts in the fall, but a different comedy (about vampires) from the same creators and an eighth (eighth!) NCIS show, set in New York and starring LL Cool J (his third full-time NCIS-verse gig) and Scott Caan.

• In the criminal justice NBCUniversal system, there is room for more Law & Order: SVU but not more L&O: Organized Crime. (SVU will pass 600 episodes next season, putting it in range of Gunsmoke’s all-time drama series record of 635.)

On to the charts for last week:

*Across ABC, CBS, NBC and the three biggest cable news networks, coverage of the Artemis re-entry and splashdown brought in more than 27 million people, plus high six figures (at least at the last time I checked it) on NASA’s YouTube livestream. ABC had by far the biggest single-network audience for what was a very cool thing to witness.

**Whenever possible, I like to note that Goergie & Mandy is set in the mid-1990s and is a multi-camera spinoff of/sequel to Young Sheldon, which was set in the ‘80s and early ‘90s and was a single-camera spinoff of/prequel to The Big Bang Theory, a multi-camera show that took place in the present day.

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

*Strong showings for both of these sports telecasts. The NCAA final was up a little vs. last year even though the 2025 game was on CBS, which has a wider reach than TBS et al. The Masters had its most watched final round since 2015 and peaked with 20 million viewers from 6:45-7 p.m. ET, right as Rory McIlroy was wrapping up his second straight Masters win.

**This doesn’t include the Artemis II re-entry special, which started later in the evening and was counted separately.

*Taylor Sheridan’s latest Yellowstone-adjacent show, though it’s not directly tied to that franchise — but it is hilariously over the top about how The Big City is Bad and wide open spaces are Good.

**According to Nielsen, Grey’s Anatomy has been among the top 10 library shows on streaming for 320 weeks since it started tracking those things at the end of 2019. That was 328 weeks ago, so Grey’s has only not made the charts eight times.

*For whatever reason, this extremely normie cop show has a pretty big young audience (including teenagers who watch with their parents), which fuels both new episodes after they hit Hulu and viewing of past seasons.

**A rare instance where the per-episode viewing works out to under 1 million minutes (890,000 in this case). For that to happen and the show still to make a top 10 means that the show’s catalog is really big — 500 episodes certainly qualifies.

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