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Ratings: Athens Is NBC's Gyro
It's official: 203 million U.S. viewers caught some or all of NBC's Joey ads aired during the last 17 days of August.
The occasion for the hypefest, also known as the Summer Olympics, was the most watched Summer Olympics ever, the network said--the games with home-field advantages (1984 Los Angeles; 1996 Atlanta) not included.
In all, viewership for the Athens Games, which concluded Sunday, was up 10 percent from the surf-'n'-turf activities held four years ago in Sydney. Prime-time ratings were up 9 percent.
NBC's sister cable networks (Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, USA), which shared the workload of the 24/7 coverage, brought in a combined 69 million viewers.
In a statement, Dick Ebersol, Chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, credited the improved numbers on a philosophy that had become increasingly foreign to Olympic producers: Show the games.
"We quickened the pace of prime time, significantly cutting back on features and relying on our commentators to do more of the storytelling that is still so important," Ebersol said.
Ebersol didn't specifically give a shout-out to women's beach volleyball, but he could have.
NBC's coverage of the sport's semifinal and final matches helped make their broadcasts the week's two-most watched shows for the TV week ended Sunday, per Nielsen Media Research.
Monday's coverage, featuring an all-American women's beach volleyball semifinal, as well as men's and women's individual gymnastics, averaged 25.9 million (first place). The gold-medal triumph of U.S. spikers Misty May and Kerri Walsh was part of a Tuesday broadcast that averaged 25 million (second place).
Sunday's closing-night ceremonies averaged 19.6 million, down from the 25.4 million who observed the opening ceremonies.
In all, NBC's prime-time Olympic coverage last week averaged 22 million viewers, nearly three times that of second-place CBS (7.4 million), and five times that of ABC (4.5 million) and Fox (4.3 million). (The UPN, meanwhile, won its own private battle with the WB, 2.5 million to 2.3 million.)
The games were most popular in Salt Lake City, home of the 2002 Winter Games. The Olympics played particularly well in California, where San Francisco (fourth place), San Diego (eighth place), Sacramento (ninth place) and Los Angeles (20th place), all supplied big audiences. Viewers in the top TV market, New York City, apparently had better things to do. The Big Apple didn't crack the top 20 for metered-market Olympic ratings.
NBC goes back into the faster-higher-stronger business in February 2006 for the Winter Games from Torino, Italy. There'll be less beach volleyball, yes, but also probably fewer Joey spots.
Elsewhere:
NBC's post-Olympic schedule got off to a bronze-medal start Monday night. Season premieres of Fear Factor and Last Comic Standing averaged 9.4 million viewers from 8-11 p.m., running behind preseason NFL football on ABC (10.9 million) and reruns on CBS (9.5 million).MTV's Sunday night broadcast of the relatively tame 2004 Video Music Awards was watched by 10.3 million viewers. That's slightly down from last year's festivities, which featured the three-way smooch of Britney, Madonna and Xtina, but still good enough to rank as the week's most watched show on cable.
On Fox, the two-hour debut of The Complex: Malibu, a home makeover series with a nasty game-show twist, appeared condemned, nailing down just 3.5 million viewers Monday night.
In daytime, The Jane Pauley Show debuted Monday to the best numbers for a syndicated premiere since fall 2002, its distributor said. Pauley does a solid job for her old show, Dateline NBC, on Wednesday with a pretaped interview in which she talks about her battles with hives and bipolar disorder, not necessarily in that order.
Reruns of CBS' CSI (eighth place, 12.6 million) and Everybody Loves Raymond (14th place, 9.4 million) were last week's most watched non-Olympic drama and comedy, respectively. The Amazing Race 5, also on CBS, was the most watched reality series (ninth place, 10.5 million).
Fox's initiative to reintroduce viewers to Family Guy picked up support, with back-to-back-to-back-to-back reruns averaging 5.2 million, up from 4.7 million for the previous week's 'toon marathon.
ABC's coverage of the Little League World Series put up little league numbers--2.5 million (87th place) for Saturday night's U.S. championship game; 3.4 million (72nd place) for Sunday's world championship contest featuring the all-stars from Curacao downing the kids from Thousand Oaks, California.
Here's a rundown of the 10 most watched prime-time shows for the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research:
1. Summer Olympics (Monday), NBC, 25.9 million
2. Summer Olympics (Tuesday), NBC, 25 million
3. Summer Olympics (Wednesday), 24.3 million
4. Summer Olympics (Thursday), NBC, 21.5 million
5. Summer Olympics (Friday), 20.1 million
6. Summer Olympics (Sunday), NBC, 19.6 million
7. Summer Olympics (Saturday), 18 million
8. CSI, CBS, 12.6 million
9. The Amazing Race 5, CBS, 10.5 million
10. Without a Trace, CBS, 10.5 million
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