“'The Voice' and the NFL boost NBC's ratings in its premiere week”

A strong one Football on Sunday evenings Game and good performances in several of its long-running series helped NBC achieve its largest viewership in the first week of the 2024-25 season.

For the week of Sept. 23-29, the network averaged 6.2 million viewers in prime time, according to Nielsen numbers from the same day (which doesn't take streaming or other delayed programming into account). NBC has led the season's opening week in total viewers six years in a row and in adults 18-49 for 13 consecutive times.

ABC came in second for the week with 5.4 million viewers, helped by two major sports telecasts (Monday Night Football and its prime-time college football game on Saturday), followed by CBS (3.3 million) and Fox (1.8 million).

There's a caveat here, though: CBS waits until mid-October to release much of its programming. Football on Sunday evenings would probably keep NBC in the lead anyway — see the six-year opening-week winning streak above — but the margins would likely be narrower. CBS won a total of 16 consecutive seasons from September to May.

Even without the NFL, NBC still finished at the top of the premiere week: In terms of pure entertainment programming, it averaged 4.2 million viewers, again ahead of CBS (2.9 million), ABC (2.8 million) and Fox (1. 8 million). NBC had six of the ten most-watched non-sports shows of the week, led by the season premieres of The voice (5.96 million viewers) and Chicago fire (5.6 million) and the season finale of America's Got Talent (5.46 million), which ranked second, third and fourth for the week. CBS' 60 minutes was first with 9.57 million viewers.