“America’s Got Talent” ruled all entertainment shows on TV last week, holding onto its first-place slot in ratings that include “live,” as well as on-demand numbers — despite larger DVR catch-up for both “Bachelor in Paradise” in “Big Brother.”
How dominant were those three broadcast series? Once you remove football from the equation, the trio combined for the Top 7 slots on television. Hey, you would schedule your hits a few times a week too.
With each passing TV season, appointment viewing feels like more and more of a relic from a simpler time — one with no DVRs or streaming services. Nielsen’s Live + Same Day ratings,
still reported each day by TheWrap and other publications, no longer tell the full story of an episode’s success — or its lack thereof.
As a result, TheWrap is publishing
a weekly column that includes three days of catch-up viewing — just enough to drain some DVRs, but not so much that the episodes studied are a distant memory.
We’re counting cable, and those channels are heavily represented in the bottom half of our Top 20. (Really it’s 24 this week because of ties.)
Of note last week, a “Simpsons” rerun on Fox tied for ninth place. That encore episode only earned a 1.1 rating because it followed a big NFL football game, so it did not benefit from a DVR lift, as depicted in our chart below.
See our chart for the results from the week of Monday, Sept. 2, 2019 — Labor Day — through Sunday, Sept. 8, 2019. All numbers come from Nielsen’s Live + 3 Day ratings metric.
For the sake of focusing on heavily time-shifted programming, we’ve omitted sports. We made a judgment call and decided to keep WWE programming, which is branded as “sports entertainment,” in this study of entertainment series. You’ll see “Raw” take up three lines below. That’s just how USA Network has always coded the hours.
As readers can see, the biggest actual growers of the week were “Jersey Shore: Family Vacation,” “Snowfall,” “Mayans M.C.,” “BH90210” and “Below Deck Mediterranean.” Of course, the lower the starting point, the greater the opportunity for big percentage growth.
Check back with us each Friday for the latest rankings from the previous week.
