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Ratings Erosion Continues for NBC’s ‘Quiz’ — Show Has Steadily Lost Ground on Each of Its First Four Nights

Sep 13, 2013  •  Post A Comment

The ratings decline continued Thursday night for NBC’s heavily promoted new game show "Million Second Quiz," based on Nielsen overnights for the key 18-49 demo.

TVbytheNumbers.com reports that "Quiz" slipped to a 1.1 average in the demo, making it Thursday’s lowest-rated prime-time show on the big four broadcast networks, factoring out repeats on NBC itself. The number continued a trend that has been going on all week, with preliminary demo numbers for the show coming in with a 1.7 on Monday, slipping to a 1.5 on Tuesday night and losing ground further with a 1.3 Wednesday.

"Quiz" isn’t faring much better in total viewers, either. Thursday’s installment delivered a preliminary 4.22 million. Only NBC’s other prime-time programming — two repeats of "Hollywood Game Night" — fared worse, in either total viewers or adults 18-49. "HGN" had 3.11 million viewers at 9 p.m. (with a 1.0 average in 18-49) and 2.86 million at 10 p.m. (1.0 average, again). Even a repeat of "Wipeout" on ABC, with a 1.3 demo number and 4.32 million total viewers, topped NBC’s "Quiz."

TVbytheNumbers notes that numbers for ABC and CBS may be subject to more than the usual adjustments because of Thursday night football telecasts in local markets and may be inflated.

At the other end of the prime-time ratings spectrum, CBS’s "Big Brother" claimed the rights to top show of the night with a 2.6 average in viewers 18-49, ticking up one-tenth of a point from last week. CBS also had a 1.7 for its fall preview show.

A repeat of CBS’s "The Big Bang Theory" at 8 p.m. came in with the same number as Fox’s fresh two-hour "X Factor," with both shows averaging 2.2 ratings in the 18-49 demo. But the number for "X Factor" was enough to push Fox to the top of the heap for prime time overall.

Fox won the night with a 2.2 average in adults 18-49 for prime time, followed by CBS (1.9 average), ABC (1.4), Univision (1.3) and NBC (1.0). Fox just beat out CBS in total viewers, averaging 6.8 million to CBS’s 6.7 million, followed by ABC (5.1 million), NBC (3.4 million) and Univision (3.3 million).

2 Comments

  1. The “Million Second Quiz” is too confusing for most casual viewers of the show to follow, and requires too much of a time commitment. Viewers are losing interest in the show.

  2. It was a stupid concept from the start. Agreed that no one has the time commitment and sad that all the hype ended up being wasted on another NBC failure.

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