Tv Ratings | featured news

Against a rousing football game on NBC, Fox’s broadcast of the Primetime Emmy Awards attracted an average of only 12.5 million people — the trophy show’s smallest audience since its famously disastrous 2008 broadcast on ABC. Last year’s Emmy show bagged about 1 million more viewers than Sunday’s, according to early reports (final national stats won’t be in until Tuesday morning).

It may have been an overall awkward and dull-ish affair, but Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards shattered ratings records for the network.

On Tuesday afternoon I was reading the Sports Business Daily and stumbled upon this interesting set of data regarding the Nielsen Ratings for Sundays at the PGA Championship over the last 15 years. In 7 of the last 15 years, the Sunday Nielsen rating at the PGA Championship exceeded 6.0.

The NBA's championship-winning game for the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday was seen by nearly 24 million people, leading ABC to its most-watched week during the slow summer season in nearly 10 years. The Nielsen Co. said the Mavericks' series victory over the Miami Heat was seen by an average of 17.3 million people over the six games. That's a little less than the viewership for last year's Lakers-Celtics series, which had the advantage of going to a climactic seventh game.

MTV said Thursday that racy teen dram "Skins" will not be returning for a second season in the U.S., due to dwindling ratings for the American version of the popular U.K. show.

Fox carried over its winning ways and ratings gains from the American Idol finale on Wednesday to the season premiere of So You Think You Can Dance on Thursday. The two-hour opener (3.2/10 in 18-49, 9.1 million viewers) was up 7% in 18-49 and 11% in viewers from last summer's premiere. It was the most watched SYTYCD premiere in 4 years and highest rated in 3 years.

Preliminary figures show Wednesday's finale of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" scored its highest audience in 17 years. The Nielsen Co. said Thursday that the final episode delivered a 13.3 household rating in the nation's metered markets.

He was a little bit country; she was a little bit country. Scotty McCreery, the 17-year-old from Garner, N.C., won, but the real competition wasn’t between him and fellow Southerner Lauren Alaina, 16, of Rossville, Ga. All along, the contest was between “American Idol” past and “American Idol” present. It turned out that even after 10 seasons, with fewer frills and a different cast of judges, the ratings soared. “American Idol” is indestructible.

CBS' "The Amazing Race" finale dips, but ABC's "Brothers & Sisters" season ender gets a double-digit boost.

Apologies for not filing a rating story earlier, it was a pretty big busy morning in TV news today. With the final ratings for last night in, here are the biggest highlights:
NBC's The Office (3.5/10 in 18-49) was down 17% from last week's episode, which marked the departure of star Steve Carell.