This Was the Least-Watched Broadcast TV Show in March
CBS came in like a lion with the five most-watched shows of the month
One might sugarcoat the audience for The CW’s “Charmed” reboot as being “charming,” considering its tiny size.
In March, the (relatively) new sister-witch reboot “Charmed” averaged just 346,000 total viewers across three telecasts, according to Nielsen’s Live + Same Day metric, the lowest tally for any broadcast TV series.
Even CW-mate “Nancy Drew” drew 45,000 more viewers per episode, across four episodes.
One CW special actually performed worse this month than “Charmed,” a reboot of the 1998-2006 series that debuted in fall 2018.
“All American” spinoff, “All American Stories,” settled for just 194,000 total viewers (anyone age 2 or older). But again, that particular telecast was coded as a special, so we’ll look the other way — for this story, at least.
The CW has traditionally had the smallest linear TV audiences of the English-language broadcast networks. The youth-skewing channel is heavily reliant on digital viewing.
Right about now you’re probably wondering what was the most-watched broadcast series this month. It likely comes as no surprise that CBS’ “NCIS” claimed that top slot, averaging 9.8 million total viewers across three telecasts.
CBS took the Top 5 spots in March audience tallies. Behind “NCIS” sat three episodes of “60 Minutes” (9 million), one of the conveniently separate “60 Minutes Presents” (8.2 million), three “FBI” episodes (7.7 million) and one of Queen Latifah’s “The Equalizer” (7.4 million).
That’s where NBC takes over with “Chicago Med,” “The Voice” and “Chicago Fire.”
If we were counting specials, CBS would actually occupy the Top 7 slots. That’s because March’s No. 1 broadcast was Oprah Winfrey’s sitdown interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, which scored 17.9 million total “live” viewers. The Grammys grabbed 9.3 million.
Why are we focusing on the fairly antiquated Live + Same Day metric, you may be asking? While admittedly an imperfect way of measuring viewership in 2021, there simply wouldn’t be enough apples-to-apples delayed-viewing data available at this point to perform a fair analysis. At least every telecast is counted — and in the same boat — this way.
This “Charmed,” starring Melonie Diaz, Madeleine Mantock and Sarah Jeffery, is a reboot of the 1998-2006 series of the same name, which ran on The CW’s predecessor network, The WB, for eight seasons. The original “Charmed” starred Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano as sister witches, with Rose McGowan joining the cast as a fourth sister following Doherty’s Season 3 exit.