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Coronavirus Has Dismantled This Year’s Premiere Week Ratings – Who’s Taken the Biggest Hit?

2020 is not just weird and awful in real life, it’s also weird and awful in TV land! The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent production shutdown has left television executives with a pretty bare fall TV schedule and viewers with some less-than-stellar primetime options. Broadcast viewership trends would have likely decreased Nielsen numbers this season anyway due to an influx of streaming platforms and other causes of audience fragmentation. But the massive drops networks have seen this week are mostly due to COVID-19 pausing or altering the production process, clogging the pipeline of new episodes that ordinarily start to air in late September. While Nielsen’s calendar would disagree, in many ways, this really isn’t even Fall Premiere Week: It’s seven days of freezer-burned leftovers from a meal that was prepared last winter. Also Read: Ratings: ABC Game Show Premieres Can't Quell the 'Big Brother' Effect The networks have felt that crush in TV ratings. The steepest fall thus far this fall has been at CBS, “America’s Most-Watched Network,” which has attracted 64% fewer viewers over the first three days of Nielsen’s Premiere Week 2020 than it had over the same period last year. For the first three nights of Premiere Week...

Read original story Coronavirus Has Dismantled This Year’s Premiere Week Ratings – Who’s Taken the Biggest Hit? At TheWrap