Ratings: ‘Celebrity Family Feud’ and ‘BattleBots’ have impressive start for ABC

While we may still long for the days of ABC creating more reality competition shows, you really cannot argue with some of the success that they had with their lineup Sunday night.

Let’s start first and foremost with Steve Harvey’s “Celebrity Family Feud,” which drew the best premiere numbers for a summer network show in over a year with a 2.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic. Getting that around this time of the year, unless you are “America’s Got Talent,” is really unheard of. When you consider that this show was virtually just normal “Family Feud” with a few famous people, it also probably was extremely inexpensive. Just based on this alone, we envision someone giving Harvey even more airtime in the future, even if it is just for the summer months.

Meanwhile, the premiere of “BattleBots” was extremely solid in its own way in a 1.9, which is still more than double the premiere of “Mistresses” from this past week and far superior to what “The Quest” or “Whodunnit?” posted in recent years. We figured that the network would be lucky to draw around a 1.5, especially with competition out there from both “True Detective” and the premiere of “The Last Ship” over on TNT.

We’ll have some other news on these shows as the summer progresses, but for now we will say that we’re looking forward to the showdown between “Bachelor” franchise members and “Dancing with the Stars” pros. That is more of what we are watching this sort of show to see! Normal family members are nice, but they don’t often pop off the screen.

We posted more on the “Celebrity Family Feud” premiere over the weekend, so be sure to head over here to check it out! Also, you can sign up now in the event you want some other TV updates on all we cover, courtesy of our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: ABC.)