‘Tracker’ Leads Strong Mid-Season Premiere Week For CBS As Scripted Hits Return In Full Force
29.02.2024 - 16:29
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: CBS is quickly returning to dominance on broadcast TV with the mid-season rollout of its scripted programming.
After a strong post-Super Bowl debut, Tracker held onto quite a large audience with 12.9M viewers tuning in for the second episode after seven days of viewing across broadcast and streaming. That’s about double the same-day audience of 6.9M for the second episode, which is still quite a large showing for the Sunday primetime hour.
The series appears to be holding onto that momentum, too, as the third episode was up to 7.1M same-day viewers. In the seven-day viewing window, Tracker is up 73% from the viewing for that time slot last year with East New York.
According to the company, the premiere episode has tallied around 30M multi-platform viewers since its debut.
The second episode of Tracker capped a solid premiere week for CBS, as many of its scripted hits returned to the airwaves. In addition to Tracker, four additional series managed more than 10M viewers for their premieres in the seven-day window — NCIS (11.5M), Young Sheldon (11.2M), FBI (11.1M) and Ghosts (10.9M).
Blue Bloods, Fire Country, NCIS: Hawai’i, FBI: Most Wanted, and The Equalizer all scored more than 9M.
Of its 15 returning series, 13 managed year-over-year increases in viewership compared to their premiere weeks last season. Only Blue Bloods and Equalizer declined by small margins of 7% and 9%, respectively. It’s worth noting that many of these series premiered in the fall of the 2022-23 broadcast season, not the spring.
NCIS and Young Sheldon were among those with the largest year-over-year audience increases. With 11.5M viewers, NCIS was up 16% versus the prior season premiere. That seven-day viewing added about 4M viewers