‘Thursday Night Football’ Ratings Down From Thanksgiving 2016, Macy’s Parade Steady, ‘Young Sheldon’ Up
First of all, hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and secondly, what was going on with the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants last night?
Yes, the DC team ended up beating the Giants 20-10 but that was a terrible game on Thursday Night Football. A game that saw more national anthem protests as Giants defensive end Oliver Vernon took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner. Otherwise, were it not for some worthy moves by the Redskins’ QB Kirk Cousins, there wouldn’t have been a lot to see from NBC and the NFL on the holiday night.
Which is why, with a 9.7 result in metered market ratings, last night’s TNF was down 10% from last year’s Thanksgiving NFL match-up on the Comcast-owned net. However, week-to-week, the TNF of Thanksgiving 2017 stayed pretty steady with the November 16 TNF with a slight 3% bop up in MM ratings.
At the other end of NBC’s Thursday, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade snagged a 12.5/27 metered market rating this year. The 9 AM – Noon shindig, that saw Jimmy Fallon and The Roots bringing a little Prince to the cold streets of Manhattan, dipped 7% from 2016. Taking a bigger picture perspective, the once again Matt Lauer, Savannah Guthrie and Al Roker hosted parade has the bragging rights for NBC of being the top MM rated show of the current TV season that wasn’t a sporting event.
Overall, NBC unsurprisingly won Thanksgiving primetime with a 4.2/16 rating among adults 18-49 and 14.4 million viewers. In non-adjusted fast affiliate results, TNF pulled in a 4.4/18 in the key demo and an audience of 14.9 million. That’s up 57% over last week’s fast affiliate demo numbers.
The November 16 TNF game where Pittsburgh Steelers thrashed the Tennessee Titans 40-17 went on to score a 4.2/16 among the 18-49s and 13.51 million sets of eyeballs.
Coming off the L.A. Chargers 28-6 win over the Dallas Cowboys in the late afternoon, CBS put an almost full slate up last night with Young Sheldon (2.6/11), Mom (1.8/7), Life In Pieces (1.3/5) and S.W.A.T. (1.1/4). That’s a 30% rise over last week’s final numbers for the Big Bang Theory prequel and the best Young Sheldon has done on a Thursday night so far. As for the other trio of CBS offerings, they were up 28%, 18% and 22% respectively.
Playing the long game, the House of Moonves is proudly flying the flag that compared to Thanksgiving Day 2016, last night saw rises of 48% in viewers and 64% in the key demo for the network.
ABC and Fox went the full encore route last night and the CW may have wished they had done the same. Supernatural (0.3/1) and Arrow (0.3/1) fell 57% and 40% each from last week to hit series lows. Of course, with their classifications as specials, neither will impact the overall season average of the two shows.
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