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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Fri.-Sun., Jan. 11-13)

By ED BARK
Misery loves company, but how about abject misery?

Whatever, a record-setting D-FW crowd for this season watched the Cowboys' season crash, burn and distinegrate Sunday.

Dallas' 21-17 loss to the Giants averaged 1,131,992 total homes on Fox, edging the Nov. 29th Cowboys-Packers prime-time game (1,088,901 homes) on both MY27 and cable's NFL Network. (Note: these numbers are for the actual running time of Sunday's game, which began at 3:46 p.m. and ended at 6:49 p.m.)

At its peak, from 6:30 to 6:45 p.m., the game had a gargantuan 50.1 Nielsen rating (1,220,236 homes). This means that more than one-half of all in-home TV sets in the D-FW viewing area actually were turned on and tuned in to the Cowboys.

That's an astonishing achievement in a now mega-crowded TV universe. And of all sets actually in use, 72 percent were dialed in to Fox4 in those 15 minutes. The entire game averaged a 70.8 percent share of the viewing audience.

The game jet-fueled Fox's 7 p.m. premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which drew 455,457 total homes to decimate all competing programming. Then CBS' two-hour premiere of its three-night Comanche Moon miniseries took over, riding high with 345,855 homes from 8 to 10 p.m.

Comanche Moon for the most part "skewed old," however, averaging 179,744 viewers in the advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-old demographic. That was good enough to win overall from 8 to 10 p.m. But in comparison, Terminator amassed 391,022 viewers in the 18-to-49 demo.

Left for dead at 8 p.m., and rightly so, was NBC's one-hour Golden Globe Winners Special. It drew a sub-paltry 70,632 homes and just 37,841 viewers in the advertiser-preferred demographic.

Sunday's second biggest attraction, San Diego's almost equally stunning upset of Indianapolis, had an average of 557,752 D-FW homes on CBS.

On Saturday, the Green Bay Packers' snow-coated comeback win over Seattle attracted 499,298 homes on Fox, including of course, this one. The subsequent Patriots' prime-time victory over Jacksonville drew a slightly higher 501,734 homes on CBS.

Friday's locally produced Belo8 Cowboys special oddly failed to light many fires, drawing only 90,117 homes from 7 to 8 p.m. in finishing fourth during that hour. Still, it drew a bigger crowd than a new episode of the lamentably under-appreciated Friday Night LIghts (60,890 homes), which had the night's smallest prime-time audience among the Big Four broadcast networks.

Friday's local news wars went to Belo8 at 10 p.m. in both total homes and with 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

Fox4 again won at 6 a.m., although narrowly in both cases over Belo8. The ABC station cleaned up at 5 and 6 p.m. with wins across the board.