Surprise, Surprise: Football Dominates Weekly TV Watch-Time

Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for September 18-24, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

Football, football and more football — the classic September refrain. NFL is still sitting pretty at the top of the ranking, but had a slightly lower viewership share compared to last week, 7.89% vs. 8.01%. Meanwhile, college games upped their watch-time from 5.69% to 6.57%. 

Some additional insights about the top programming on TV:

• Football commentary programming including NFL RedZone (No. 8) and College Football Studio (No. 25) made inroads week-over-week.

• The Golden Girls continues to march up the chart, rising four spots week-over-week to No. 20 with a 0.39% viewership share. 

• Thanks to rerun marathons on TV Land and IFC, Everybody Loves Raymond jumped from No. 44 to No. 23 week-over-week, capturing 0.35% of minutes watched. 

• With 0.28% of watch-time, Dateline enters the ranking at No. 22, a jump from its previous position at No. 30, thanks to rerun episodes airing on multiple networks including NBC, Oxygen, MSNBC, USA and CNBC, among others. Season 32 of the show premieres Friday, September. 29. 

See which TV networks made the top 25 ranking over on The Measure.