Olympics Skate Around Mount ‘Idol’
Thursday’s Prime-Time Perfect Storm — in which the Winter Olympics on NBC battled not just Fox hit “American Idol” but also no-slouches “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC and CBS’s “Survivor” — left everyone bloodied but some happier than others.
“Idol” snagged far and away the biggest audience in the 8-to-9-p.m. hour — 23.4 million viewers. Now, that’s the smallest audience for this edition of “Idol,” but it catapulted Fox to its biggest Thursday night in 13 years.
Though the Games once again got pounded by “Idol” in head-to-head competition, snaring fewer than 18 million viewers in the hour, NBC recovered by holding back all the taped women’s figure skating play until after “Idol” and running until nearly midnight. In prime time, NBC averaged nearly 24.5 million viewers — the biggest Thursday prime-time audience for any network this season.
But NBC’s Olympics coverage wound up with about a third fewer viewers (nearly 13 million) than the prime-time night of the women’s figure skating finals at Nagano in ‘98.
Of, course, at Nagano, women’s figure skating did not face “American Idol,” “Survivor” and “Dancing With the Stars.” The competition faced a repeat of the flick “Maverick,” a repeat of the flick “Speed” and the memorable Muppets special “Elmopalooza.”
At Nagano, the women’s figure skating finals — always the most watched Winter Olympics competition — were held on Friday, protected from NBC’s extremely powerful Thursday lineup.
CBS’s “Survivor” took a hit this Thursday night, copping its smallest audience ever for a regular episode — fewer than 15 million viewers.
“Dancing With the Stars” fumbled nearly 2 million compared with the previous week but, in the expanded two-hour block, it produced ABC’s biggest Thursday audience with regular programming in more than five years.
Viewers were happy with the Thursday bloodshed. According to Nielsen, about 11 million more people watched television — broadcast and cable — that night than usually tune in.
That said, the combined prime-time averages of all six English-language broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN and the WB — only slightly exceed the 73.5 million who watched the women’s figure skating finals from Lillehammer in 1994 — aka the Nancy Kerrigan vs. Tanya Harding Games.