Sunday’s wild Buffalo Bills vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL Playoffs game was one not soon to be forgotten — especially by producers of “NCIS: Hawai’i.” The freshman drama drew a whopping 9.3 million total viewers last night following the overtime AFC barnburner.
It’s important to note here that, due to the nature of live sports, the below initial Nielsen numbers for CBS should be considered subject to significant adjustment. We will not have a thorough and accurate picture of CBS’ Sunday night dominance until final Nielsen numbers, including out-of-home viewing, become available tomorrow. We’ve included the earliest-available numbers for CBS below simply as a preliminary snapshot of the network’s primetime dominance last night.
For now: CBS was first in ratings with a 7.2 rating in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 demographic and in total viewers with an average of 28.7 million, according to preliminary numbers.
ABC and NBC tied for second in ratings, both with a 0.4 rating. ABC was second in total viewers with 3.4 million, NBC was third with 1.8 million.
For ABC, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” at 7 p.m. had a 0.4 rating and 4.7 million total viewers. At 8, “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune” got a 0.4 rating and 4 million total viewers. “Supermarket Sweep” at 9 received a 0.3 rating and 2.2 million total viewers. At 10, “The Rookie” closed out primetime with a 0.3 rating and 2.7 million total viewers.
NBC’s primetime was buoyed early on by some late-running NFL coverage. The network’s only original program of the evening was a “Dateline Sunday” episode at 10, which drew a 0.3 rating and 2.2 million viewers. The hour was coded a special, as were the earlier reruns.
Fox was fourth in ratings with a 0.2 and in total viewers with 682,000, airing all reruns.
The CW was fifth in ratings with a 0.0 and in total viewers with 345,000. All three shows settled for a 0.0 rating among adults 18-49. None of them were reruns. The “Legends of the Hidden Temple” season finale at 8 managed 226,000 total viewers. That was more than two episodes of “Two Sentence Horror Stories” averaged. The first, at 9, had 203,000 total viewers. The second episode at 9:30 got just 173,000.
We do not have early Nielsen numbers for Spanish-language broadcast networks Univision and Telemundo.