World Series AP
An especially strong series, to be sure, wrapping up with Game 5 leaves it short of more growth.
With all the year-to-year increases for each game, Fox and the MLB were likely hoping to squeeze more than five games out of the 2015 World Series — but baseball's annual marquee event wrapped up on Sunday night with 4:1 series in favor of the Kansas City Royals.
On many occasions besting comparable World Series games over the last six years, preliminary stats for the Sunday finale gave its primetime showing more than 16 million viewers ahead of time zone adjustments. The Fox telecast likely got a boost from its substantial football lead-in — and while it will rise in Nielsen's final numbers, it won't approach the series-ending 23.5 million viewers to watch Game 7 in 2014.
Sunday marked the first night in the World Series where the game had to face the NFL. And while NBC's Sunday Night Football will emerge as the biggest show of the night, it's only pacing 4 million viewers ahead of the World Series. One place where it baseball definitely had the advantage was Kansas City. The game did astoundingly well in the winners' hometown, where an estimated 90 percent of TV-owning households tuning into the game's climax at 11:30 p.m. CT.
Prior to Sunday's wrap-up, the 2015 World Series had been averaging 14 million viewers per game. That's up 18 percent from the previous year. The Mets-Royals series was up the most among younger viewers, rising 26 percent in the key demo of adults 18-49 to a 3.9 rating.
All of the added sports competition took its toll on scripted series. Quantico, averaging a 1.2 rating among adults 18-49 on ABC, dropped three-tenths of a point to its same-day low. And both the Good Wife (0.9 adults) and Madam Secretary (1.1 adults) fell by two-tenths of a point on CBS.
The night's biggest scripted show (Once Upon a Time with a 1.5 rating in the key demo) and most middling (Blood and Oil and CSI: Cyber, each with a 0.8 adults), were steady against sports.
Full details on Game 5 audience and demo, as well as updated averages for the 2015 series, will be available later on Monday.
TV Ratings
