90-Day Domination: TLC Topped All of TV on Sundays and Mondays Among Adults 18-49 This Summer

TLC will take these audience deliveries, to have and to hold. Last fall, this weekly column dove into the “90 Day Fiancé” universe’s TV ratings. Well, that dominance proved it was not seasonal, as the show and its (many) spinoffs just led TLC to summer-long Sunday and Monday primetime wins in the delivery of adults 18-49. We’re not just referring to cable — that top ranking includes broadcast television, too. On Sundays this summer, ABC (862,000 viewers 18-49) was the No. 2 network in primetime by that metric across all of TV. NBC (851,000) was television’s runner-up on Mondays. TLC averaged deliveries of 1.4 million viewers 18-49 on Sundays and 1.1 on Mondays. On Sundays from 8 p.m.-10 p.m., “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?” averaged 1.6 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, which is the key demographic for advertisers on most of TV’s primetime entertainment programming. (TLC actually sells most of its ads based on women 18-49, a demo which it totally dominates. We wanted to give the rest of TV a chance by including the men and removing any argument of skewing statistics by sex.) Counting all programs with at least three telecasts this summer, “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?” is the top program across all of television on Sunday nights. Across the summer season, for which we are generally counting June, July and August (perfectly, a 90-day period), the 8-10 p.m. time slot also included two hours of the “Tell All” version of “90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days,” which posted 2.3 million viewers among people 18-49. At 10 p.m., TLC mostly aired “Smothered” this summer, which averaged 733,000 demo viewers. All numbers in this story come from Nielsen’s Live + 3 Days audience-measurement metric. Two Sunday episodes of “Smothered: Knows Best” averaged 594,000 adults 18-49, and three episodes of “Darcey & Stacey” had 937,000. That series follows Darcey Silva, a “90 Day”-universe alum, and her sister Stacey. Mondays included more shows, but mostly it was “90 Day Fiancé: B90 Strikes Back” (816,000 viewers 18-49) from 8 to 9, “90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way” (1.6 million viewers 18-49) from 9-10 and “90 Day Pillow Talk: The Other Way” (824,000 demo viewers) from 10 to 11. That 8 o’clock-on-Mondays hour also included two “Tell More” episodes of “90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days” on TLC, averaging to 1.6 million viewers ages 18-49. At 9, one “Self-Quarantine”-coded episode of “90 Day Fiancé” averaged 766,000 viewers. At 10, one “What Now?”-titled episode received 750,000 viewers in the demo. Yeah, there’s a lot of “90 Day Fiancé” iterations. And, in aggregate, it all seems to be working.