Holiday TV Ratings: NFL and College Football Dominate, CBS Makes New Year’s Eve Inroads

Rick Porter
·4 min read
1

Thanksgiving has long been associated with football — NFL games on the holiday date back decades and typically deliver the league’s biggest regular-season TV audiences in any given year.

The past couple years, however, Christmas has also fallen within the NFL’s usual weekend footprint, and the league has capitalized. Coupled with huge New Year’s Day numbers for one of college football’s most recognizable games, the holiday period was an especially football-heavy one on TV.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Elsewhere, CBS (also with an assist from the NFL) scored a bit of an upset on New Year’s Eve; Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building found a new audience on ABC; and NBC’s new comedy Extended Family had a decent start.

Running down the ratings highlights from the end of 2023 and start of 2024:

The NFL had an unusually good Christmas weekend, with four games — one on Dec. 24 and three on Dec. 25 — drawing more than 27 million viewers. The Miami Dolphins’ 22-20 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Christmas Eve had the biggest audience at 31.52 million viewers — the third largest of the season for the NFL, behind only two Thanksgiving games.

Peacock’s first exclusive NFL contest also performed pretty well, averaging 7.33 million viewers on Dec. 23. Two days before that, Amazon’s Prime Video wrapped its second season of Thursday Night Football, which was up 24 percent from 2022.

The Christmas bonanza for the NFL came at the expense of the NBA, which averaged 2.85 million viewers for its five-game slate on Christmas Day. That was down 30 percent from a year ago, although it’s not a surprise given the marquee matchups among the NFL games — and given the fact that since ABC aired the Monday Night Football contest in primetime, it wasn’t able to simulcast ESPN’s primetime NBA game as it has in years past.

College football‘s bowl season picked up in a big way around the New Year’s weekend, with six games averaging 6.8 million viewers or more. The biggest by far was the Rose Bowl matchup between Michigan and Alabama, which was also a College Football Playoff semifinal. ESPN’s multi-channel telecast drew 27.76 million viewers, the biggest audience for any college football game since the 2018 national championship. The Sugar Bowl (Washington vs. Texas) followed with 18.77 million viewers — a low for any CFP semifinal — but the two-game slate still posted the third highest average viewership for the semifinals in the 10-year history of the playoff.

ABC typically dominates New Year’s Eve celebration coverage, but there was something of a surprise on Dec. 31: CBS’ New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash outdrew ABC’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in primetime. Following another huge NFL contest (26.17 million viewers), the CBS show outdrew ABC in the first couple hours of primetime. New Year’s Eve Live averaged 8.31 million viewers from 7:30-10 p.m., while the first two hours of Rockin’ Eve came in at 7.03 million. (Both specials improved by double digits vs. 2022.) ABC reclaimed the lead later in the night, averaging 10.43 million viewers from 10:30-11:30 p.m. (to 6.93 million for CBS) and 18 million from 11:30 p.m.-1 a.m., a 30 percent jump over the 2022 show. CBS came in at 8.17 million viewers for its late-night show, a 52 percent improvement year to year.

After the turn of the calendar, ABC got good showings from the broadcast premiere of Only Murders in the Building, averaging 3.13 million viewers for a two-hour block of the Hulu comedy’s first three episodes. The Hulu series’ first season is airing on ABC in January as the network fills time ahead of its own scripted shows returning in February. The first returns on The Golden Bachelor: The Golden Wedding are also good for ABC: Thursday’s special posted 5.22 million viewers in the same-day Nielsen ratings, above the main show’s average for the season.

NBC, meanwhile, is likely fairly happy with the start for its comedy Extended Family. After a post-NFL premiere on Dec. 23 pulled in 4.65 million viewers, the show’s time period debut drew 3.33 million viewers Tuesday, holding on to the great majority of its Night Court lead-in (3.77 million).

Jan. 8, 10:40 a.m. Updated with final same-day ratings for The Golden Wedding.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter