‘The World’s Best’ Debut Tops 22 Million Viewers After Super Bowl LIII

James Corden-hosted global competition is down 18 percent in total viewers compared to last year’s post-game “This Is Us”

World's Best
CBS

CBS’s answer to “America’s Got Talent,” the new James Corden-hosted competition series “The World’s Best,” bowed to 22.22 million total viewers on Sunday, following Super Bowl LIII. That’s down 18 percent compared to the show that had 2018’s coveted post-game time slot, “This Is Us.”

Last year, the NBC family drama scored 27 million total viewers and had a 9.3 rating among adults 18-49. Those were both way up from the prior year’s “24: Legacy” debut, which settled for 17.6 million overall sets of eyeballs and a 6.1 rating in the key demo. Last night, the “World’s Best” premiere did better than the latter show in the 18-49 range, but not the former program, posting a 7.0 rating.

Meanwhile, CBS boasted big late-night numbers for its special Sunday episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” which aired after the local news and posted 5.52 million viewers, the show’s third-highest viewer total ever.

As far as the actual sports portion of the evening, Super Bowl LIII received 100.7 million total viewers across multiple platforms, which is down from last year. How much of a decline depends on how you look at it.

Sunday’s all-in sum counts a bunch of streaming platforms. Last year’s Super Bowl LII had 103.4 million viewers on just NBC alone, a total that grew to 106 million when factoring in additional platforms.

Crunching some numbers, that means the 53rd big game one is down 5 percent from the 52nd one.

A few million more eyeballs will be tallied when out-of-home viewers are added in later this week. That new (at least in terms of turnaround time) metric grew NBC’s 2018 boast to 118.2 million viewers, for an example.

You can read about the “World’s Best” overnight ratings here. And check out the metered market returns for the big game here.

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