Talent Showdown: ‘The Voice’ Premieres, ‘The Masked Singer’ Ends, and ‘The World’s Best’ Keeps Trucking Along
Michael Becker / FOX Reading Time: 3 minutes
The month is changing, spring is nearly upon us, and we’re seeing a shift in our talent show roster. This week we saw The Masked Singer wrap up its first season, The Voice begin its 16th, and The World’s Best FINALLY air in the same timeslot on back-to-back weeks.
Next week American Idol will join the fray (and soon become direct competition for The Voice) but for now let’s see how this unique talent show line-up of a week played out in the ratings.
The Voice
Both the Monday and Tuesday night installments of the first week of Season saw impressive results for NBC. Monday’s premiere had 10.75 million viewers and a rating of 2.1, while Tuesday’s episode got 10.55 million viewers and a 2.0 in the ratings. The Voice was the highest-rated and most-watched primetime program on both nights, with its closest competition being ABC’s The Bachelor – also in the Monday 8-10 pm timeslot – which got a rating of 1.8.
The Voice has been one of TV’s most consistent unscripted hits for years now, and that dominance certainly doesn’t look to be diminishing any time soon.
The Masked Singer
We probably should be long past the point of being surprised by The Masked Singer‘s success by now, but they managed to deliver one more for us.
We all remember the overwhelmingly high ratings of the series premiere back in January (9.4 million viewers and a same-day rating of 3.0) but for the finale they somehow managed to top themselves. The special two-hour episode had 10.02 million viewers and a rating of 3.1, making it FOX’s highest-rated Wednesday telecast in years. And – as usual – nothing else even came close (Survivor on CBS came in a distant second place for the night with a 1.5 rating.)
While there was some concern over whether the novelty of The Masked Singer‘s concept might wear off for viewers, it never did and the show had consistently high ratings throughout the season. It’s already been renewed for a second one, so hopefully the hype will return when the show does.
The World’s Best
In contrast to its fellow talent shows this week, The World’s Best experienced yet another drop in the ratings department with a 2.64 million viewers and a 0.4 rating. Those are very low numbers, and it looks like this show is pretty much on death’s door. Its last hope may come next week now that it won’t be sharing a timeslot with The Masked Singer anymore, but it really does feel like the writing is already on the wall with this show.
As we head into March, it’s looking like – much like last spring – the next few months the talent show battle will be between The Voice and American Idol, back for its second season of the ABC reboot. We’ll see how that plays out in the weeks to come.
