‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Tops Ratings In First Week Back, Sees Surprising Delayed Viewing Rise

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is back at the top.

The CBS show took the ratings crown during late-night’s return last week, despite tough competition at the start of last week from Jimmy Kimmel Live!

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It comfortably beat Kimmel’s show and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon over the course of Monday through Thursday in the Live+3 Day ratings, per Nielsen.

However, the most surprising aspect of its ratings were perhaps the delayed viewing lift, scoring its highest three-day lift in over five years.

The Late Show averaged 2.79M viewers across the week in L+3, beating Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which averaged 1.78M by over a million viewers, and The Tonight Show, which averaged 1.42M. The Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live! air Monday through Thursday, while Fallon has a show on Friday nights (those full L+3 numbers are not in yet).

Over its first week of shows, The Late Show added 809,000 viewers when adding in three-day playback, which was its best since February 2018 when it added 833,000. The traditional wisdom is that late-night shows are watched live on linear television with little delayed viewing, but it seems that many people are taping the show and watching back the next day. We hear that the uplift also over indexes with younger people, which is a surprise given that you’d expect older folk to go to bed earlier and watch the next day, compared to younger people.

Kimmel, who had Arnold Schwarzenegger on his first show back after the writers strike, scored its most-watched season premiere in six years on the live+same day numbers, helped on the east coast by coming after Monday Night Football.

It averaged 2.27M total viewers on the night, which was 5% above CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which was watched by 2.16M and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which was watched by 1.48M.

However, The Late Show added nearly 1M viewers on delay on Monday, averaging 3.11M win plus three numbers. It was The Late Show’s best Monday performance since Tom Hanks appeared in January. Neil deGrasse Tyson was the guest.

Elsewhere in the week, Colbert had guests including John Oliver, Anderson Cooper, Bob Odenkirk and Fortune Feimster as well as musical guests including Boygenius and Japanese Breakfast.

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