Weekly on-air numbers: NBA, '60 Minutes' and the summer dropoff

The big news in the TV/media business in the past week has been the extremely bleak reshaping of 60 Minutes under CBS News head Bari Weiss. Last week, the show fired its executive producer, Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, along with a few other senior producers. CBS then hired Nick Bilton, a former New York Times columnist and Vanity Fair writer and lately a producer of some documentaries — but a guy with little to no TV or management experience — as the EP of 60 Minutes.

That … has not gone over well. Leaks have been pouring out of CBS News pretty much nonstop, and 60 Minutes correspondent (and former Evening News anchor) Scott Pelley loudly challenged Bilton and Weiss in a staff meeting earlier this week. He was fired Tuesday, and has continued to rip the new bosses on his way out.

Amid all that, a 60 Minutes rerun … performed as it usually does on Sunday, finishing fourth among all primetime network shows last week with 5.29 million viewers. As bad as all this mess might end up being for 60 Minutes journalistically, as a TV show measured by ratings, it’s unlikely to suffer for now. For one thing, it’s summer, and CBS will be showing repackaged stories from the previous season for the next three months under the title 60 Minutes Presents. For another, outside the media business, most people probably haven’t even heard of Bari Weiss, Nick Bilton or Tanya Simon, and even if they know Pelley because he was a face of the program, his absence won’t be apparent till the fall.

And also, as much as it produces really good long-form reporting a lot of the time, I would venture that 60 Minutes is mostly a habit for a large chunk of its viewers. For literally almost my entire life (I’m 54), the show has aired on Sunday evenings — 6 p.m. for a few years in the early 1970s and 7 p.m. every year since 1975. The median age for a network TV viewer is in the mid-60s, so those folks have known it as a Sunday staple for most of their lives too. Habits don’t die easily. I’ll be (morbidly) curious to see what happens when 60 Minutes starts airing new episodes again in the fall, but until then anyone trying to read the ratings for evidence of the behind-the-scenes mess is making stuff up.

On to the numbers — which will include more than just the primetime top 10 and all-day top 20 that I’ve been doing. And look out for a streaming-only ratings newsletter on Thursday, part of the new schedule around here.

“R” stands for rerun.

*Streaming on Peacock added 3.23 million viewers, per NBC Sports, for a total of 15.9 million viewers. That’s the biggest audience for an NBA conference final game in 10 years.

**Down by a little more than a million viewers from last year, when the awards show also aired on Memorial Day.

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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.)

*Because the Knicks swept the Cavs, the Eastern Conference finals didn’t have any extra games to build a bigger audience. Best-of-seven series just about always get bigger the longer they go.

**CBS splits The Price Is Right in half for ratings purposes — and because it’s summer and the bar is lower, you’ll likely be seeing it in the all-day top 20 pretty regularly.

***Ditto for The Five, which consistently draws the largest daily audience in cable news outside of big events. This is a pretty typical weekly average for the show.

*Speaking of TV shows-as-habits: Jeopardy! and Wheel outdraw most or all primetime shows in a given week (here’s the top 10 for that week). They both get prime placements on local stations and have been at or near the top of the syndication charts for as long as I’ve been paying attention to ratings (which is 20-plus years).

**Judge Judy hasn’t produced a new episode since 2021 but still gets a lot of eyeballs every weekday. Judy Justice has its first run on Prime Video, but older episodes are sold to broadcast stations too.

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