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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Wed., Sept. 28) -- Fox again stirs the drink with Empire, Lethal Weapon

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom on Twitter
Fox’s Empire again dominated Wednesday’s prime-time terrain while the network’s second episode of Lethal Weapon stayed strong as a warmup act.

Lethal Weapon comfortably won the 7 p.m. hour in both total D-FW viewers (283,573) and advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-olds (102,627). As with last season’s Rosewood, though, the Empire warmup effect plays a major role.

In this case, the first 15 minutes of Lethal Weapon drew 239,946 total viewers and the closing 15 minutes, 356,284. That significantly inflates the overall ratings average. Among 18-to-49-year-olds, Lethal Weapon began with 89,799 viewers and ended with 118,663. How many of those viewers were simply tuning to Fox in advance anticipation of Empire? Most of them, you can be assured.

Empire then crunched all competing programming with 436,266 total viewers and 211,669 in the 18-to-49 age range.

At 9 p.m., the second episode of ABC’s Designated Survivor impressively more than doubled its audience lead-in from black-ish to win the hour with 225,404 total viewers. But it fell to third with 18-to-49-year-olds (57,728), trailing Fox4’s local newscast (102,627) and NBC’s Chicago Med (60,935).

ABC’s 7:30 p.m. second episode of Speechless ran last in total viewers among the Big Four broadcast networks and moved up to third -- ahead of the second half of NBC’s struggling Blindspot -- in the 18-to-49 demographic.

Here are Wednesday’s local news derby results.

TEGNA8 drew the most total viewers at 10 p.m. while NBC5 won among 25-to-54-year-olds (main advertiser target audience for news programming).

Fox4 again had twin wins at 6 a.m. and NBC5 ran the table at 6 p.m.

The 5 p.m. firsts went to NBC5 in total viewers and Fox4 among 25-to-54-year-olds.

Email comments or questions to: unclebarky@verizon.net