American Music Awards Getty Images
Aside from football, the music kudos pull the biggest crowd on Sunday night.
Facing considerably more modest football competition than in 2014, The American Music Awards put up a steady showing on Sunday — easily giving ABC the best non-NFL showing of the night.
Preliminary returns give the three-hour music kudos a 3.5 rating among adults 18-49 and just a hair shy of 11 million viewers. (That's mostly in line with 2014, which brought a 3.8 rating in the key demo and 11.6 million viewers with final adjustments.
Compared to last week's Sunday Night Football, NBC's Bengals-Cardinals match-up was off 14 percent from last week's preliminary score for a tentative 5.6 rating in the key demo.
Football, at least a half-hour's worth, was much bigger on Fox. The network's brief overrun and a strong episode of The OT helped drive up comedy numbers considerably. But Fox, as we learned on Friday, would rather people ignore those same-day numbers. In an effort to move the conversation towards time-shifting and multiplatform, Fox will no longer be addressing its same-day scores.
That said, The Simpsons still climbed to a robust 2.3 rating with adults 18-49 before new episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (1.7 adults), Family Guy (1.6 adults) and The Last Man on Earth (1.3 adults) were similarly improved.
On CBS, 60 Minutes (1.5 adults), Madam Secretary (1.1 adults), The Good Wife (0.9 adults) and CSI: Cyber (0.9 adults) were all down from the previous week's NFL overrun lift.
TV Ratings
