powered by FreeFind

Apple iTunes

Archives

Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Fri.-Sun., Jan. 20-22) -- NFC/AFC championship games pile on the points

By ED BARK
One ended with a missed field goal, the other with a made one. And both went down to the final seconds, giving the NFL total dominance of Sunday's D-FW Nielsen ratings.

CBS had the early game, a 23-20 Patriots win over the Ravens when former kicker Dallas Cowboys kicker Billy Cundiff shanked a chip shot field goal that would have sent the AFC championship tussle into OT.

Running from 2:07 to 5:10 p.m., the game averaged 1,029,663 viewers, peaking at 1,178,693 in the closing minutes.

Then came Fox's Giants-49ers NFC championship game, won by New York in OT when its kicker, Lawrence Tynes, made a field goal from almost exactly the same distance as Cundiff's botched attempt. Starting at 5:42 p.m. and ending at 9:35 p.m., the game averaged 1,293,853 viewers with a peak crowd of 1,774,812 between 9:15 and 9:30 p.m.

The next closest prime-time attraction, CBS' 7 p.m. episode of Undercover Boss, had 216,771 viewers.

Fox's special one-hour episode of American Idol, pushed all the way back to 9:57 p.m. after the post-game wrapup, hung in with a nice-sized 521,606 viewers. That crunched the competing 10 p.m. local newscasts on NBC5, WFAA8 and CBS11, which had a combined audience of 460,639. CBS11 led the news threesome with 182,901 viewers.

CBS led Friday's prime-time ratings from start to finish in total viewers with a lineup of A Gifted Man, CSI:NY and Blue Bloods.

In Friday's local news derby results, WFAA8 nipped CBS11 at 10 p.m. in total viewers while NBC5 topped the field among 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

Otherwise it was all Fox4, with the station running the table at 6 a.m. and 5 and 6 p.m.