CBS Just Broke Its Own Record-Long Win Streak from the ‘Gunsmoke’ Days
It’s time for some “CSI: Nielsen Ratings.”
CBS is set to win the 2023-24 season as the most-watched network — again — it’s now been 16 straight seasons of the same. CBS has now broken broadcast television’s longest winning streak on record, which was also CBS: From 1955 to 1970, when “Gunsmoke,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and (some of) “I Love Lucy” ruled its airwaves.
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Fast-forward 50 years to the current TV season, which runs from fall (September) through spring (May), and CBS has won 21 of the past 22 years. (The lone hiccup was in 2007-08, when Fox won amid a wonky writers-strike plagued season; sound familiar?) CBS is also poised to win the season among adults 18-49, long-considered the key demographic for advertisers, as well as its own target market, viewers 25-54. It is also number 1 this year among 18-34-year-olds; Super Bowl LVIII sure helped CBS pull those victories out of its football helmet.
How big was the 2024 Super Bowl? Well, 123.4 million total viewers tuned in across multiple platforms, primarily CBS. (Paramount+ was a very distant runner-up, but it definitely contributed to the tally.) Another way of looking at it: the Kansas City Chiefs’ latest Super Bowl win was the biggest U.S. telecast since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Perhaps Apollo 11 should have saved a seat for Taylor Swift.
Recently (and currently), the Super Bowl has rotated between CBS, NBC, and Fox. As the most-watched telecast of the year, every year, the big game can make a big difference in the final Nielsen standings. Guess who had the Super Bowl in that long 2007-08 blemish on CBS’ record? Not them, it was Fox’s turn.
Counting a week of delayed viewing, which is standard these days, CBS is currently (through April 21) averaging 5.59 million total viewers (anyone age 2 or older) in primetime (8-11 p.m.), according to Nielsen, which is more than half-a-million more than second-place network NBC (5.01 million). It’s north of a million viewers better per night than ABC (4.29 million) in third, and more than 2 million viewers larger than Fox (3.35 million). The CW is basically an “also-ran.”
It should be noted that CBS’ main rival NBC prefers to look at the Nielsen standings through a calendar-year lens. This is a fair but convenient approach: its “America’s Got Talent” is the number 1 summer show, and every four years (including this one) NBC has the Summer Olympics, which run the table for nearly three straight weeks. So NBC tends to win the summers, which TV ratings currency company Nielsen certainly measures but has historically not considered to be “in-season.” Often the calendar year goes to NBC while the season sticks with CBS.
This season, save NBC’s “Chicago Fire” (number 5) and “Chicago Med” (number 8) CBS has completely owned broadcast’s top-10 series list. It has 13 of the top 20 broadcast series and the three biggest newcomers (“Tracker,” “Elsbeth,” and “NCIS: Sydney”) to over-the-air television.
The wins don’t go away after 11 o’clock: CBS had the most viewers in late-night for the seventh-straight year.
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