TV Ratings: ‘This Is Us’ Finale Earns Season Highs

Rick Porter
·2 min read

This Is Us closed on a high note — emotionally and in the Nielsen ratings.

The NBC series finale led Tuesday’s broadcast offerings with the highest adults 18-49 rating for any network drama this season, 1.27. It’s only the second time this season a drama has scored above a 1.0 in same-day ratings — the other was This Is Us’ season premiere in January, which came in at 1.05. The only other broadcast entertainment shows to score a higher same-day demo rating — episodes of The Simpsons (1.32) and Next Level Chef (1.55 and 2.59) on Fox — all had NFL games as lead-ins.

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The finale also drew a season high of 6.37 million viewers, again besting the previous high (5.46 million) set by the premiere. This Is Us adds an average of 0.7 points to its 18-49 rating and 3.3 million viewers with a week of delayed viewing, per Nielsen; streaming doubtless pushes both numbers higher but those figures aren’t readily available.

Both the 18-49 and total viewer numbers for This Is Us are the show’s best since November 2020, early in the show’s fifth season. The series will finish its run as the top-rated network drama in adults 18-49 in each of its six seasons, based on seven-day Nielsen ratings.

The halo from This Is Us also helped the season finale of New Amsterdam (0.47 in 18-49, 3.45 million viewers) hit its best same-day ratings since first episodes of its season.

A repeat of CBS’ FBI — whose season finale was pulled due to a storyline that echoed the Robb Elementary School mass murders in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday — was the second most watched show on the networks with 6.19 million viewers.

Earlier in the night, President Biden’s televised remarks on Uvalde drew 15.43 million viewers across ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Telemundo and Univision. The cable news channels didn’t break out the ratings for Biden’s remarks, but all three 8 p.m. shows — Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (4.44 million viewers), CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 (2.27 million) and MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes (1.61 million) — were well above recent averages.

Game four of the NBA’s Western Conference finals on TNT led cable in total viewers with 6.19 million and all of Nielsen-rated TV among adults 18-49 with a 1.99 rating.

Bookmark THR.com/Ratings for more ratings news and numbers.

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