Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Weed 3’ Scores Time Slot Win Over Fox News in Key Demo

CNN’s 9 and 10 p.m. marijuana-centric programming block gets viewers buzzing

CNN has an especially good reason to celebrate 4/20 this year: The premieres of “Weed 3: The Marijuana Revolution” and the new original series “High Profits” created a heavy buzz on Sunday night, giving the news network some head-spinning ratings.

“Weed 3: The Marijuana Revolution,” reported by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, premiered at 9 p.m. and averaged 299,000 viewers in the key 25-54 news demo, versus Fox News’ 188,000 demo viewers in the time period and 98,000 demo viewers during the period.

At 10 p.m., the eight-part docu-series “High Profits” — about a business-minded couple (pictured above) with a plan to franchise marijuana — premiered and averaged 284,000 demo viewers, compared to 205,000 for Fox and 115,000 for MSNBC.

Now there’s something to puff up about.

In total viewers, however, CNN suffered something of a bummer. While CNN took the key demo crown for the 9 p.m. hour, Fox News still held the total viewership crown, scoring nearly 900,000 total viewers versus CNN’s 744,000 — and that was with a repeat episode of Fox’s new series “Legends & Lies.” Likewise, Fox News averaged more viewers in the 10 p.m. hour, when it aired another “Legends & Lies” repeat. During that hour, Fox News averaged 760,000 total viewer, compared to 643,000 for CNN.

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