Talent Show Stand-Off: How did ‘America’s Got Talent: The Champions’, ‘The Masked Singer’, and ‘The World’s Best’ Fare in the Ratings This Week?
FOX Reading Time: 4 minutes
America’s Got Talent: The Champions
This show has been pretty consistent with strong ratings and high viewership numbers all season, and it continued that trend with its most recent episode. Like last week, the AGT spin-off finished second in the Monday night ratings. It got a 1.7 (up a tenth from last week) and was only beaten out by ABC’s The Bachelor which got a 1.9.
And once again, Champions was the most viewed show of the night with 10.44 million people tuning in. That’s nearly a million more than last week’s season low of 9.79 and just barely below the season high of episode four’s 10.45 million viewers. It blew everything else on Monday night out of the water in this regard, with nearly 3.5 million more viewers than the 7/04 million the second-most-watched show, CBS’s The Neighborhood, got.
The AGT brand is strong for NBC is a hit and even though next week is the Champions finale, Season 14 starts filming it just a few weeks and we’ll only have to wait a few short months for it to premiere. It’s a good time to be an America’s Got Talent fan.
The Masked Singer
The surprise winter hit from FOX continued to dominate in the ratings this week with a 2.4. That’s two tenths higher than last week, making it the show’s third-highest rated episode yet. No other Wednesday primetime program even approached that number (NBC’s Chicago Med came the closest with a 1.3).
The Masked Singer was the third-most-watched program of the night with 7.84 million viewers, behind Chicago Med (8.81 million) and Chicago Fire (8.52 million) on NBC. This was up by nearly a million from the 7.13 million it had last week, becoming the third-most-watched episode of the series to date.
We were concerned the novelty of this show might have worn off by now, but it’s clear they’ve managed to build and maintain a diehard audience. Hopefully the momentum will continue for the rest of this first season and into the next one, which FOX ordered a few weeks back.
The World’s Best
After a larger-than-expected drop from its post-Super Bowl premiere to its first Wednesday episode, things were looking dicey for The World’s Best last week. This third episode also dropped in the ratings, but not nearly as much. It got a rating of 0.9, just one tenth down from last week’s 1.0. Drops like that are pretty normal, and as AGT Champions and Masked Singer have proven, and can easily jump back up a tenth or two in future weeks.
However, any number below 1.0 for a primetime show on a major network tends to be worrisome in the ratings world, and the show went from third in it’s timeslot last week to fourth this week, behind NBC’s Chicago Med (1.3), ABC’s The Goldbergs (1.1) and FOX’s Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back (1.0).
The World’s Best was the second-most viewed show in the 8-9 pm timeslot for the week with 5.81 million viewers to Chicago Med’s 8.81 million, experiencing a small bump from last Wednesday’s episode (5.56 million). But this week’s episode was only an hour long and therefore did not have to compete against fellow unscripted talent show The Masked Singer. The show won’t be so lucky as to escape that fate again next week when it goes back to being two hours long for next week and moves to Wednesday at 9/8 c.
Inconsistency in timeslots and episode length tend to be detrimental to TV shows, and the issues with the latter don’t look to be ending anytime soon (next week’s episode is two hours long, but the week after’s is one again). but what may help World’s Best is its new time making the lead-out program of Survivor, one of CBS’s most consistent hits for nearly two decades. Hopefully it’ll stay there for the rest of the season and build some momentum, especially after Masked Singer wraps up in the next few weeks and leaves World’s Best as the only network primetime talent show offering on Wednesday nights.
