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    ‘Barbenheimer,’ and an Early Start, Boost Oscar Ratings to 4-Year High

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    ABC’s telecast of the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday drew 19.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.The comeback of live event TV continues.ABC’s telecast of the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday drew 19.5 million viewers, hitting a four-year viewership high, according to Nielsen. The live TV audience was up from last year’s 18.8 million, the third consecutive year that Oscar viewership has grown.The ratings report will prompt cheers at ABC and the academy, which bumped the start of the venerable awards ceremony to 7 p.m. Eastern, an hour earlier than usual, in the hopes that more viewers would stick around through the final categories.That approach appeared to pay dividends, as did the numerous nominations for the big box office hits “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — a change from recent years when more obscure films dominated the ceremony. Jimmy Kimmel also received warm reviews in his fourth outing as host, leaving him one away from matching another late-night star who moonlighted at the Oscars, Johnny Carson.Nielsen said that Sunday’s Oscars were the most-watched network awards show since February 2020, extending a recent trend where viewer interest has perked up for the kind of mass cultural events that struggled during the pandemic.In February, 16.9 million people watched the Grammy Awards, a 34 percent increase from last year. Viewership of the Golden Globes in January rose 50 percent compared with a year ago. The Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers beat ratings records with an audience of 123.7 million. Even ratings for the 2023 Tony Awards, traditionally the least-viewed of the “EGOT” quartet, rose modestly.At Sunday’s Oscars, Billie Eilish sang her pop ballad “What Am I Made For?” and Ryan Gosling delivered a cheeky yet dedicated performance of “I’m Just Ken.” The choreography, which drew on Busby Berkeley films and the Marilyn Monroe musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” was complemented by a cameo by the thrash-rock guitarist Slash and a bevy of supporting Kens from “Barbie,” including Simu Liu.ABC, which has the broadcast rights to the Oscars through 2028, said that it had sold out its advertising inventory for Sunday’s event. The network did not share prices, but advertising executives said ABC had charged $1.7 million to $2.2 million for a 30-second spot, up slightly from last year. Some of the ads turned up in the broadcast itself, like a plug for Don Julio tequila, in which Guillermo Rodriguez, a Kimmel sidekick, offered the beverage to celebrities in the audience.In 2021, for a stripped-down pandemic Oscars held in a Los Angeles train station, only 10.4 million people tuned in. Viewership rose in 2022 to 16.6 million people, in part because of the bizarre spectacle of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.Still, there is no question that TV viewing habits have changed. Before 2018, the Oscars telecast had never dropped below 32 million viewers. More

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      Super Bowl Viewership Rose to 123.4 Million, a Record High

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      The figure easily exceeded last year’s 115.1 million, capping off a big year for N.F.L. ratings.Sunday night’s overtime Super Bowl shattered ratings records.An audience of 123.4 million watched the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen and CBS, which broadcast the game. That figure easily eclipsed last year’s record high of 115.1 million, when Kansas City defeated the Philadelphia Eagles. Final Nielsen ratings for the Super Bowl will be issued on Tuesday,The figure is the total who watched on CBS, the Paramount+ streaming app, the Spanish-language channel Univision, N.F.L. digital channels or Nickelodeon, which aired a child-friendly telecast. The vast majority watched the game on CBS, which recorded 120 million viewers, according to Nielsen. The game had a lot going for it. It went into overtime, concluded with a game-winning touchdown pass (for a 25-22 final score) and featured an elite Kansas City team with a superstar quarterback, Patrick Mahomes. Travis Kelce, Kansas City’s starting tight end, also happens to be dating a megastar in Taylor Swift, who attended the game in Las Vegas.At a moment when traditional television ratings have been in free fall, the N.F.L., particularly the Super Bowl, has stood immune to massive viewership changes affecting the rest of the media world. Thirteen of the last 15 Super Bowls have drawn more than 100 million viewers, according to Nielsen, a bigger audience than in earlier decades.Sunday’s performance also capped off a big year for N.F.L. ratings.Viewership was up 7 percent, according to Nielsen, falling just shy of the record set in 2015. Several playoff games set ratings records, including the A.F.C. championship game on CBS, which scored more than 55 million viewers, and an A.F.C. divisional playoff game that drew more than 50 million. The N.F.C. championship game was a little short of a record.League officials have pointed to numerous close games this season — along with a playoff hunt that still included several teams toward the end — as big reasons that ratings jumped. (It’s less clear how much Ms. Swift helped boost viewership.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Viewership Fell Sharply for Second G.O.P. Debate

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      Fewer than 10 million people watched the Republican presidential candidates on Wednesday, according to preliminary data from Nielsen.Fewer than 10 million people watched the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, according to preliminary data from Nielsen, a sign that interest in the race is waning without the presence of former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner for his party’s nomination, who has so far refused to participate in the debates.The audience on Wednesday — viewers of Fox News (6.7 million), Fox Business (1.8 million) and Univision (813,000) — was down from the 12.8 million people who tuned in last month to watch the first Republican primary debate. Fox also hosted that debate.Those numbers are a fraction of the audiences for the first two Republican presidential debates in the summer of 2015, when a crowded field and curiosity about Mr. Trump pushed ratings to record highs. The first, hosted by Fox News in Cleveland, drew nearly 24 million viewers — ranking among the most-watched events in cable-TV history. The second, hosted by CNN in Simi Valley, Calif., had an audience of 22.9 million.Without Mr. Trump this primary season, the networks and the Republican National Committee are in a difficult spot. Television executives will be faced with deciding whether it’s worth the cost to produce an event that is drawing relatively tepid interest and is, for the moment, of questionable significance given Mr. Trump’s dominance in the polls. In most national surveys taken since the summer, he has led his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by more than 30 points.Mr. Trump appears unlikely to agree to appear at any debate in the near future. His campaign said this week that he would not participate in one scheduled for early November in Miami. And one of his senior advisers called on the Republican National Committee on Wednesday not to schedule any more debates for the primary season so Republicans could instead focus on defeating President Biden.Despite the lower ratings, the debate attracted an audience larger than any other program on cable or network television on Wednesday evening. More

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      First Republican Presidential Debate Draws 12.8 Million Viewers

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      The figure exceeded the expectations of some television executives, who believed that Mr. Trump’s absence would lead to far fewer viewers.The first Republican debate on Wednesday night drew an audience of 12.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen, indicating robust interest despite the absence of former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race.The viewership figure, which includes totals from both Fox News (11.1 million viewers) and the Fox Business Network (1.7 million), was significantly higher than anything else on television on Wednesday night, and outperformed the broadcast network totals combined. It was also the most-watched cable telecast of the year outside of sports, surpassing an episode of Paramount’s “Yellowstone,” which had 8.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen.The audience total, however, is a far cry from the record 24 million viewers who tuned in to Fox News for the opening Republican debate in the 2016 election cycle, which featured Mr. Trump on a debate stage for the first time. Nor did it reach the 18.1 million who watched one of the early Democratic debates in June 2019.But the figure still exceeded expectations of some television executives, who had believed that the numbers could be low given Mr. Trump’s absence as well as cable television’s reduced presence in American homes compared with just a few years ago.Mr. Trump, leading by a wide margin in the polls and engaged in a running feud with Fox, skipped the debate. Instead, he appeared for an interview with Tucker Carlson — the former prime-time star, who was ousted by Fox News this year — on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The interview was posted shortly before the debate began on Wednesday evening.Mr. Trump declared his X interview a “blockbuster” on Thursday morning. It is not clear, however, how many people watched the interview. Anytime users on X scroll past a post with the video in their feed, it counts as a “view” — one of the few metrics the social network makes public — whether they watched the video or not. Nielsen’s television ratings more rigorously track the number of people who watched a program.The Fox News debate featured eight candidates, who often sparred aggressively with one another. They were Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum.The Fox News debate moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, spent about 10 minutes of questions on Mr. Trump and his four criminal indictments, with Mr. Baier saying he had to acknowledge the “elephant not in the room.”The next Republican debate will be on Sept. 27 on Fox Business. More