Network TV Is Officially Back
A crop of new hits and a boost from sibling streamers gave broadcast its biggest year in, well, years.
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CBS execs have heard all your Grampa Simpson jokes, but they don’t really care: The network’s reboot of Matlock is a smash hit. Within a week of premiere, every episode of the Kathy Bates-led drama has attracted an eye-popping 13.5 million viewers, including streaming on Paramount+, ratings giant Nielsen says. That not only makes Matlock the fall’s most-watched newcomer — by a mile — but the second most-watched entertainment show on broadcast TV, period (after Tracker). It’s not the only freshman to click with audiences, though; ABC’s High Potential and NBC’s Happy’s Place are certified successes, while several other 2024 premieres demonstrate early signs of breaking out.
After a decade of stories about the Death of Linear TV, 2024 has seen a boomlet in scripted hits at the networks, welcome news for broadcast staffers, or at least those still employed following years of seemingly endless layoffs. The fact that audiences are responding to traditional weekly television shows — the kind that churn out as many episodes in one season as most successful streaming shows create during their entire run — not only validates the idea that there’s room for conventional comedies and dramas in a post-Peak TV world; it also suggests that viewers still want this kind of television. “The audience has made it clear to us that they like these shows with deep libraries, that they like watching these ongoing relationships with characters over dozens or, in some cases, hundreds of episodes,” says Simran Sethi, president of scripted programming for ABC Entertainment and Hulu.
Each of the Big Three broadcast networks has reasons to celebrate:
➼ At CBS, not only is Matlock bringing in big numbers overall, it’s also radically boosting the Eye network’s already strong Thursday lineup, sandwiched between established hits Ghosts and Elsbeth. The show’s linear viewership is up 60 percent from previous Thursday-night CBS dramas, including CSI and So Help Me Todd. And while Matlock certainly has a ton of older viewers, the Youth is vibing with Maddy, too: Including streaming, the show ranks as the No. 8 entertainment series on network TV with adult viewers under 50, edging out Grey’s Anatomy and Law & Order: SVU.
On the comedy front, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, Chuck Lorre’s second spin-off of The Big Bang Theory, immediately picked up where predecessor Young Sheldon left off as broadcast TV’s most-watched comedy, with an average linear audience of 8.1 million weekly viewers (a number that jumps to 10.1 million with streaming factored in), Nielsen says. While new Monday-night sitcom Poppa’s House has a more modest overall audience, with around 4.6 million weekly linear viewers, it’s doing a better job holding on to its lead-in (The Neighborhood) than the show it replaced (Bob Hearts Abishola) and, per CBS, its streaming viewership is up a massive 205 percent versus Bob. (A dispute with Nielsen means CBS isn’t able to use that company’s data when making claims about its programs, but the network has access to rival measurement firm VideoAmp and its own Paramount+ data. Nielsen data largely tracks with the ratings claims from VideoAmp.)
➼ Over at ABC, High Potential — about a janitor-savant who accidentally ends up with a gig helping the cops solve murders — has more than lived up to its title. The Kaitlin Olson-led procedural ranks as ABC’s most-watched new series since the 2018 launch of The Conners (a show boosted by its connection to iconic sitcom Roseanne). High Potential is snagging about 6.6 million linear viewers every week, with a streaming audience on Hulu and Disney+ bumping that number to just shy of 11 million viewers, per Nielsen. High Potential has managed this despite its 10 p.m. time slot, where overall viewing tends to be lower and, in recent years, the failure rate for new dramas has tended to be higher.
ABC is also cautiously optimistic about Doctor Odyssey, the new Ryan Murphy cruise-ship drama it slotted between veteran hits 9-1-1 and Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday. While not quite a breakout like High Potential, Doc Odd’s average linear audience of 5.14 million viewers is about 25 percent above what now-canceled Station 19 was doing on that night while also slightly improving on the 4.9 million Grey’s had in the 9 p.m. slot during its strike-shortened season last spring. Doctor Odyssey is averaging 6.9 million viewers, counting streaming, with its pilot episode snagging a strong 11.1 million viewers within its first five weeks of release.
➼ NBC’s big hit this season is Happy’s Place, the Friday-night sitcom reuniting Reba McEntire and Melissa Peterman. The show is currently averaging just over 5 million weekly viewers on linear (and notching roughly 6.5 million with streaming added in), nearly doubling what NBC was doing on Fridays last fall with imported Canadian drama Transplant. Happy’s Place has also consistently succeeded in the same-day Nielsen ratings, regularly outperforming ABC’s veteran Shark Tank, which airs in the same time slot, in total viewers — along with everything else on NBC’s Friday-night lineup. Meanwhile, St. Denis Medical has only been on the air for a few weeks, but NBC suits are very hopeful about the early sampling for the new mockuseries from Superstore creators Justin Spitzer and Eric Ledgin. The show is averaging about 6.5 million viewers and doing particularly well with NBC’s target demo of adults under 50, ranking 10th in Nielsen’s season-to-date top 10 for the demo, thanks to huge streaming numbers.
Broadcast’s bountiful fall harvest follows a spate of scripted successes for network TV over the past two years. CBS newcomers Tracker and Elsbeth exploded out of the gate when they launched this past February, dominating their respective Sunday and Thursday time slots and, along with 2022’s Fire Country, giving the network a young stable of drama hits that don’t have the initials of government agencies in their titles. ABC, meanwhile, launched Will Trent at the start of 2023, and the show’s strong first-season ratings have only grown since then — a rarity in broadcast TV these days. And though NBC’s Night Court reboot isn’t pulling the monster ratings it did in the weeks following its 2023 premiere, its current third season has retained a solid core audience on Tuesdays.
Unlike streaming “event” shows such as Squid Game or The Boys, which come into viewers’ lives for a few days or weeks every couple of years, these broadcast hits might not get as much buzz or win as many awards. But the volume and frequency of these shows’ episodes allows viewers to form deep, lasting bonds. “They’re in your house every week, and they live with you for years,” Sethi says of characters on a network drama or sitcom. “I don’t think the relationship audiences build with those long-running, character-driven shows is ever going to go out of style.”
There’s plenty of Nielsen data to back that up. Within a week of premiering new episodes, all the aforementioned hits bring in anywhere from 7 to 11 million viewers just from linear telecasts and DVR replays — a substantial number, though obviously a lot fewer overall than what similar smashes drew 20 years ago. But they’re attracting increasingly large audiences on streaming, too, thanks to next-day drops on Hulu and Disney+ (ABC, Fox), Paramount+ (CBS), and Peacock (NBC). Of the 10.8 million viewers who watch High Potential each week, for example, 4.3 million do so via streaming, more than 40 percent of the show’s overall audience. Three other shows — ABC’s Abbott Elementary and CBS dramas Matlock and Tracker — each bring in about 3 million streaming viewers weekly. And, per Nielsen, another half-dozen network comedies and dramas are adding in the neighborhood of 2 to 2.5 million streaming viewers each week this season, including series both new (Doctor Odyssey, George & Mandy’s) and returning (Ghosts and 9-1-1).
While in-season streaming of network shows is nothing novel — Hulu has been doing it since the late aughts — the dramatic rise in cord-cutting and the launch and explosive growth of Disney+, Paramount+, and Peacock over the past five years means there’s now a much bigger, stronger ecosystem pushing viewers to find and watch these network series outside of the traditional broadcast ecosystem. “People are coming to these shows in all the places we have them,” says Lisa Katz, who, as president of scripted content for NBCUniversal, makes programming for both NBC and Peacock. “Some might [watch] on linear or on DVRs, and some people might be seeking them out on Peacock. But it’s great to have the ability to have both and then the audience can find the shows where they are.” Sure, it might’ve been more convenient (and cheaper) for viewers when NBC shows lived next to ABC and Fox series on Hulu, but now NBC shows get a lot more on-platform support from Peacock, even if Peacock (with around 36 million subscribers) is in fewer homes than Hulu (52 million). Similarly, now that Disney has full ownership of Hulu, it has extra incentive to get the streamer’s viewers to check out ABC network shows there, as well as the flexibility to put them on Disney+, where they can (potentially) reach even more eyeballs.
As network shows find more and more of an audience on streaming, they’re also reconnecting broadcasters to a key demographic: young adults under 50, the advertiser-coveted category many in the industry had written off as allergic to network TV. No fewer than five big Thursday-night network tentpoles (ABC’s 9-1-1, Dr. Odyssey and Grey’s Anatomy; CBS’s Matlock and Ghosts) are getting more than half of their overall demo viewership from streaming this season. High Potential’s demo audience on streaming (a 1.77 rating) is currently triple its already solid Tuesday-night linear number (0.57) among younger viewers. Those extra streaming views make a huge difference in the overall network rankings: While High Potential currently stands as the No. 12 show among adults under 50 in the linear-only ratings, its combined linear-streaming demo rating (2.34) would make it the No. 1 show on broadcast TV so far this season, edging out Abbott Elementary (2.15) and putting it well ahead of the three next highest-rated shows in the combined rankings: 9-1-1 (1.7), Tracker (1.62), and Ghosts (1.59).
Right now, the combined linear-streaming ratings like the ones cited above don’t regularly get distributed by networks or studios, in part because it was only relatively recently that Nielsen started issuing more timely streaming content numbers (which are different from the minutes-viewed metric the ratings giant also puts out weekly.) But the data obviously does exist, and at some point, it seems likely that networks will push to make this combined ranking more public-facing. After all, these numbers show that while, yes, young viewers by and large aren’t sitting down to catch network shows on TV or even via DVR, they are absolutely watching them through affiliated streaming platforms. That has real value for Disney, Comcast, and Paramount as they attempt to revamp their businesses for the post-Peak TV universe. “We aggregate all those numbers to get the full picture of how a show is doing,” says CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach. “Our shows have to function very well — and be successful — both on linear and streaming.”
Though a show developed for broadcast must first and foremost work as part of a network’s linear schedule, Reisenbach and her peers at ABC and NBC are also thinking about how compatible a program will be with its streaming counterpart’s originals — and vice versa. “Fire Country is a great example,” she explains. When it debuted two years ago, “it clearly matched with Taylor Sheridan’s shows. You may show up to [Paramount+] to watch Lioness, but then the app pushes you to Fire Country, and so you might catch up on [earlier seasons] of that. And when you’re watching there, it pushes you back to the network [for a broadcast airing], where you maybe catch a 1923 promo, and you’re back on Paramount+.”
Sethi has observed similar audience behavior when it comes to ABC shows on Hulu and Disney+. “High Potential has had a really robust viewership on Hulu, and we’ve noticed that those viewers are discovering Will Trent and watching all three seasons of that show,” she says. “It’s an ecosystem that just keeps feeding [itself].” Sethi, like NBCU’s Katz, oversees scripted development for both broadcast and streaming; both say that makes it easier to ensure projects end up at the right platform within the larger company.
For instance, even though Suits streams on Peacock and originally aired on cable’s USA Network, after it broke out again on Netflix, Katz and her bosses made the decision that new spinoff series Suits: L.A. would be an NBC prime-time show. “We buy for broadcast and streaming, and some things will come in and you’ll be like, ‘That is probably not a broadcast show based on the content,’” Katz says, pointing to a project like the upcoming Peacock comedy Laid, which is just as racy as its title implies. The new Suits, however, “felt like it could work on NBC” without making any big changes to the show’s tone. “And, of course, people can still watch it on Peacock as well,” Katz adds.
With cost cutting the order of the day across all streamers, platforms are hungry for shows that deliver big audiences in the most affordable way possible. As it turns out, some of the most-watched titles on Hulu, Peacock, and Paramount+ aren’t expensive streaming-only originals, but rather, weekly episodes of series from their respective sibling broadcast networks. A few years ago, network execs felt abandoned as their corporate overlords shifted millions away from scripted broadcast series to invest in streaming. The pendulum hasn’t swung all the way back yet, but between the push for profitability at streamers and the recent spate of network hits, there’s a sense in the industry that network TV’s scripted-development engine still has value as a content pipeline for streamers — today and in the future.
That’s because many of this year’s class of successful shows will likely go on to become the next generation of catalogue hits — series like Lost, Prison Break, and, yes, Suits — which post huge numbers as binge releases, either on their sibling streamers or when licensed out to platforms such as Netflix or Prime Video. “By doing these shows on broadcast first and getting 18 to 22 episodes done in a season — which is two seasons’ worth of streaming shows — we’re creating great big libraries that can perform for a long time,” Reisenbach says. For her and the other network execs in this story, this is the fundamental advantage of network-TV-style series over premium streaming shows: They’re fundamentally more efficient at giving viewers the sort of weeks-long binge experience they’ve repeatedly shown they want. “There’s so much value we can unlock by creating shows that speak to the broadest audience possible,” she says. “It’s really a win-win-win situation for us.”
All Nielsen figures cited above are based on either Nielsen season-to-date live-plus-seven-day linear data; Nielsen’s streaming content ratings for the first seven days of release; or a combination thereof. Figures and rankings are based on first-run broadcasts of entertainment series that aired between September 23 and November 24 and do not include sports, news, specials, or summer programming that continued into the new season.
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