The Highs And Lows Of U.S. TV Ratings In 2024

Some facts about what people watched in 2024: A little blue dog was the biggest star in the streaming world; the most watched cable series in years took a final bow — at least in its current form; sports, specifically the NFL, proved their viability on streaming platforms; and the biggest new broadcast show is a meta-remake that stars a 76-year-old treasure.

On the other end of things, a broadcast network made it an entire year without a single show averaging even 1 million viewers, two of the three biggest cable news channels are swooning, and the wider cable universe is having tremendous problems getting eyeballs for programming that isn’t live sports.

It was a typically chaotic year in ratings terms, in other words. Here are some of the highs and lows.

Bad News First

Nobody knows anything: It was not long ago that there were multiple public sources of reliable ratings information online — at least for broadcast and cable networks — that were updated regularly with fairly granular data about who was watching what. As streaming became the default for a plurality of TV users, though, those sources of information (often supplied by networks passing on Nielsen data to the press) have dried up, to the point that, say, a weekly snapshot of how network shows perform after seven days of DVR viewing is almost impossible to find.

Streaming platforms are slowly becoming (a bit) more transparent about releasing some of their data, at least as it pertains to total viewing time (though that’s far from the only metric those platforms use to determine success or failure). But while publicly traded companies probably can’t outright lie about the data they put out, the math is often fuzzy and extremely difficult to check against third-party data sources. Broadcast and cable outlets have followed suit in that trend, occasionally touting individual shows that perform well (and again including hard-to-verify streaming stats) but rarely offering a window into the bigger picture. A proliferation of different ways to measure viewing — some made public, many not — have also made it harder than ever to answer the question of “How many people are watching?”

(All that said, THR did manage to scrape together a fair amount of data from reliable sources. Unless noted, all ratings figures for cable or broadcast shows mentioned are from Nielsen, and other than for news and sports, include seven days of linear viewing but not streaming, through Dec. 8. Streaming data, also from Nielsen, is for the U.S. only through Nov. 24.)

The CW’s ongoing swoon: The fifth English-language broadcast network (and its predecessors, UPN and The WB) never had what would be called huge hits, but since it aimed most of its programming at younger adults, it occupied an outsized place in pop culture. As late as the 2022-23 season, it still had a couple of shows that averaged more than a million viewers after a week of delayed viewing. As of early December, that hasn’t happened since the start of the 2023-24 season (though the three primetime NASCAR Xfinity races the network broadcast this fall came in just under 1 million). In the 2024-25 season so far, none of the network’s non-sports programming averages even 800,000 viewers without streaming.

CNN and MSNBC struggles: For the whole of 2024, cable news enjoyed viewership gains (more on that in the good news portion of this story below) — it was a presidential election year, after all. Post-election, however, CNN and MSNBC have suffered steep declines, to the point where rival Fox News has commanded more than 70 percent of the cable news audience in primetime (vs. about 55 percent for the full year). To some extent, that happens to one or more cable news outlet after every election, but into mid-December there hasn’t been much sign of a recovery for CNN and MSNBC.

Scripted cable shows, non-Yellowstone division: Alongside the sheer drop in numbers of scripted cable series, ratings have tumbled for those that remain. Outside of Yellowstone (and post-Yellowstone promotional airings for Paramount+’s Landman, also from Taylor Sheridan), there was exactly one scripted show on cable that averaged more than 2 million viewers in 2024: Hallmark’s When Calls the Heart at 2.77 million. Another Hallmark show, The Way Home, drew just under 2 million, but nothing else among the limited cable scripted offerings got to more than about 1.5 million viewers before streaming.

Now, the Good News

Yellowstone: The road to the second half of the Paramount Network hit was a bumpy one, to understate by a huge degree. But the absence of Kevin Costner and a 22-month hiatus between episodes didn’t matter to viewers, who propelled it to a host of series records, including 16.4 million viewers across nine networks (including a showing on CBS that drew about a third of the total) for the Nov. 10 premiere and 13.1 million for the finale over three days on just Paramount Network and CMT.

Bluey: The 2024 streaming champion is a show that will likely almost match the record-setting year for Suits in 2023, and one that dominated TV discourse for several weeks earlier in the year. It’s also a show aimed at kids under 10. Through late November, Bluey has amassed more than 50 billion minutes of streaming time on Disney+ — that’s equivalent to more than 95,000 years. It has made Nielsen’s streaming top 10 for 112 straight weeks dating back to October 2022 and currently holds a roughly 7 billion-minute lead for this year over Grey’s Anatomy, the only other show that has charted every week.

The NFL (obviously): Pro football remains the biggest thing on TV in the United States, with the NFL’s regular season so far running about even with 2023 — no small thing given that the league often sees a small decline in TV viewing during election years. That’s on top of a record-setting Super Bowl in February and major inroads on streaming, where a January playoff game on Peacock and then Netflix’s Christmas matchups set records for streaming-exclusive games. Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football also grew by more than 12 percent year to year.

Fox News and the election year bump: As noted a few paragraphs ago, cable news had an up year overall thanks largely to the presidential election, with all of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC improving their primetime and full-day audiences from 2023 (through Dec. 19). Fox News had the both the largest audience and biggest year-to-year gains of the three by a sizable margin, averaging 2.41 million viewers in primetime (up 31 percent) and 1.47 million for the full day (up 21 percent). MSNBC drew 1.25 million primetime viewers (up 3 percent) and 804,000 for the full day (up 4 percent), while CNN came in at 697,000 primetime viewers (up 20 percent) and 487,000 for the total day (up 2 percent).

Tracker and Matlock: Premiering after the Super Bowl in February, Tracker, starring Justin Hartley, had a huge audience (18 million-plus viewers) for its opening episode and continued to rack up big audiences for CBS after that, finishing the 2023-24 season as the top show (excluding sports) on any broadcast network. It has stayed at No. 1 in the fall, averaging 11.4 million viewers before streaming (up 5 percent from its season 1 average, not including the Super Bowl episode). Matlock, which stars Kathy Bates in a not-really-a-remake of the Andy Griffith legal show, is easily the No. 1 new show of the fall, drawing about 10.2 million viewers over its first seven episodes; besides Tracker, it’s the only non-NFL program on a broadcast network that tops 10 million viewers without streaming. (Both shows add about 3 million viewers via streaming, based on limited public data.)

Bridgerton, Fallout, Love Island, Tulsa King, Only Murders in the Building, The Bear: Based on their time in Nielsen’s streaming top 10, those are the most watched original series of 2024 on, respectively, Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock Paramount+ and Hulu — OMITB is slightly ahead of The Bear thanks partly to a weekly vs. binge release, but once the full-year tallies are released in January, The Bear could overtake it. Bridgerton had the most viewing time of all of them, with 16.91 billion minutes over 14 weeks in the top 10 (plus an as-yet-unrevealed additional tally for weeks it didn’t make the charts).

The Streaming Olympics: Nielsen doesn’t include live sports in its streaming rankings. If it did, NBCUniversal’s Summer Olympics programming would easily be the No. 1 original program of the year on streaming with some 23.5 billion minutes of viewing on Peacock and other NBCUniversal digital platforms. Live coverage of every sport and the “Gold Zone” whiparound channel brought the streamer a host of favorable press coverage and thumbs-up from viewers, contributing a sizable portion of the largest Olympics audience (30.6 million across all platforms) since 2012.

High Potential and Happy’s Place: Two other first-year breakouts. ABC’s High Potential is the network’s top non-sports show of the fall with 6.58 million viewers before streaming and, based on limited publicly available data, a big additional lift from Hulu: It climbs to more than 10 million viewers per episode across all platforms after a week, and ABC says the series premiere brought in more than 20 million people over its first 35 days. The Reba McEntire-led Happy’s Place, meanwhile, brings in 4.74 million viewers for NBC — the biggest audience for a Friday show on the network since The Blacklist three seasons ago.

Women’s basketball breaks through: Fueled by Iowa star Caitlin Clark’s pursuit of the all-time NCAA scoring record, her team’s run to the national championship game and South Carolina’s undefeated, title-winning season, the women’s edition of March Madness broke all sorts of viewing records. It culminated in 18.87 million people watching the championship game, which set the mark for a women’s game in the United States and outdrew the men’s final (14.82 million) for the first time. The momentum carried into the WNBA season, which saw ratings for nationally televised games soar and the most-watched Finals series since 1999.

ESPN’s SEC coup: ABC’s Saturday Night Football will likely end this season with the most audience growth of any primetime network telecast, thanks to ESPN taking over the broadcast rights to Southeastern Conference football this season (the league previously had a long association with CBS Sports). With SEC teams getting most of the primetime showcases in the fall, Saturday Night Football averaged close to 8 million viewers — an 80 percent increase over 2023, when it aired a mix of games from other power conferences.

AMC’s Netflix deal: AMC made a licensing deal with Netflix to showcase 15 series over the summer, with strong results: Shows like Dark Winds and A Discovery of Witches put up strong numbers in the Nielsen charts in late August and early September. The Netflix showcase also drove signups to AMC+, the network says: Season two of Interview With the Vampire saw a fourfold increase in “first streams” — what a new user watches right after signing up — on AMC+ after the first season debuted on Netflix, according to AMC.