‘Undercover Boss’ & ’20/20′ Top Friday Ratings; ABC, NBC & CBS In Dead Heat
CBS may not have the NFL’s Thursday Night Football anymore but they had a winning play courtesy of a two-time Super Bowl champion on Friday to push Undercover Boss: Celebrity Edition (0.7/4) to a tied top spot for the night.
With former Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49er Deion Sanders poising as an older man looking to improve conditions in his community, the unscripted House of Moonves series had the biggest rise of a relatively slow night. Proving football or at least a well-intentioned football player still holds a lot of sway, Undercover Boss was up almost 40% among adults 18-49 from its May 25 show.
Matching the 8 PM Undercover Boss in the key demo, ABC’s 10 PM 20/20 rose a tenth from last week. Facing a Blue Bloods (0.5/3) encore and much promoted Dateline (0.5/3) that featured the first major interview with Andrea Constand since Bill Cosby was found guilty earlier this year of assaulting her in 2004 in his retrial, the ABC news mag also easily won its time slot.
Compared to its two-hour show of last week, last night’s one-hour Dateline took a tumble of 28% in the key demo. Like the ABC show and its Shark Tank (0.5/3) encore lead-in, Dateline did not have an original preceding show with an American Ninja Warrior (0.6/3) repeat from 8 – 10 PM.
Having said that, in a rare alignment, the original Big 3 networks all achieved a 0.6/3 rating on Friday with CBS coming out on top in viewership with an audience of 5.05 million.
It obviously won’t heal the wounds of the Roseanne crash and burn of this week that saw ABC cancel its top-rated show but the Disney-owned net did get some good news out of Quantico (0.5/3) last night. Now on Fridays as the canceled Priyanka Chopra led series blows off the rest of its third season, the spy drama got an uptick of a tenth from last week.
Otherwise, the CW’s My Last Days (0.1/1) and Life Sentence (0.1/1) were the same as their May 25 airings as was the latest installment of FOX’s World Cup primer docu-series Phenoms (0.2/1).
Speaking of sports, there’s Major League Baseball on FOX tonight and tomorrow sees LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers try to score an away win against the Golden State Warriors as Game 2 of the NBA Finals gets underway. Welcome to a sporty summer.
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