Talent Showdown: One Show Reaches a New Low…is ‘Game of Thrones’ to Blame?
ABC Reading Time: 2 minutes
This week produced some surprising results in the ratings for American Idol and The Voice, with some good news and some bad.
First up was Sunday night’s episode of American Idol. It was the first live show of the season, and the first during which the audience was able to have a say by voting for their favorite contestants. However, it also aired at the same time HBO released the first episode of the highly-anticipated final season of Game of Thrones. How much did that affect Idol‘s ratings? Not by much if at all, oddly enough.
American Idol saw a 1.3 rating with 7.26 million viewers on Sunday, which actually made it the highest-rated episode in several weeks. Despite going up against the cable world’s Game of Thrones, It easily won the night on the network television side of things.
On Monday night, The Voice reigned supreme over American Idol (and every other network show) as usual, but the gap between the two was pretty small. Viewership was 7.65 million viewers for The Voice versus 7.10 milion for Idol, and the former only beat the latter by a tenth in the ratings (1.3 versus 1.2). This was the first week of live episodes for both shows, but it seems that only seemed to help Idol and not The Voice.
The news was even worse for The Voice when it hit a series low in the ratings the following evening. Tuesday’s episode only got a 1.0 and 7.18 million viewers, losing out on its usual spot at the top to CBS’s NCIS (1.1 with 11.88 million viewers). There’s usually a dip for The Voice around this point during spring seasons, but it’s never been this bad. At this rate, it might be losing out on the top Monday spot too by the end of the season.
