Summer of Talent: How Did ‘AGT’ and ‘Songland’ Fare in the TV Ratings?
TRAE PATTON, NBC Reading Time: 2 minutes
NBC certainly has a monopoly on the talent shows for the next few months. They’re the only broadcast American network airing any talent competitions this summer! NBC has created a prime time lineup for the genre on Tuesday nights. Veteran juggernaut America’s Got Talent starts at 8pm, leading into freshman series Songland right afterwards at 10pm.
But how is that working out for them in the TV ratings so far? The numbers speak for themselves!
America’s Got Talent
America’s Got Talent unsurprisingly won the night with a 1.7 in the ratings and 9.75 million viewers. That’s way down from the 2.5 and 12.16 million viewers Season 13’s premiere got last year. However, it is more on par with a typical episode of America’s Got Talent: The Champions in the winter.
Even with the lower numbers, AGT still obliterated the competition. Nothing else in its time slot got anything higher than a 0.8 (The Lion King on ABC and MasterChef Junior on FOX). Also, no other program of the night got more than 6.14 million viewers (a rerun of NCIS on CBS). Some networks haven’t started airing their regular summer programming quite yet, so we can’t tell how things will play out for sure. But it looks like AGT has a good chance of remaining the summer’s top dog for another year!
Songland
Songland is serving as AGT‘s lead-out program this summer, and the pairing seems to work well. It was the second-highest-rated prime time program of the night with a 1.1, and had 5.51 million viewers. Songland also had the highest-rated alternative summer series debut since June 2017.
It seems as though NBC has made a smart decision with their talent show block on Tuesday nights. Hopefully they will continue to perform well over the summer. But with inspirational stories like Kodi Lee and hit songs like “We Need Love,” it’s looking promising for both shows.
