Were Zoo season 3, Gong Show, Big Brother ratings hurt by NFL football?

Thursday night marked the return of NFL football, and it was certainly an interesting game given you saw the Kansas City Chiefs throttle the New England Patriots at home. This game also proved to be a ratings powerhouse, as it drew a 7.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic during preliminary figures. These could change later in the day, but these are some of the best ratings we’ve seen for virtually anything since football was last on the air.

With that sort of monster rating, it’s fair to say that this probably hurt some programming elsewhere; yet, the end result wasn’t as bad as some of you out there may have guessed.

Let’s start with Zoo season 3, given that this scripted show is very much on the bubble/currently floating along for dear life. It actually improved versus last week in posting a 0.5 rating in the 18-49 demographic, though we can’t sit here and pretend like this is a great performance for the show, either. We hope that it’s enough to get it a fourth season, but we have our doubts since we don’t even really know just what sort of criteria is being used by CBS in order to want to renew it. It has Netflix licensing and DVR ratings, but that may not be enough.

Meanwhile, the finale of The Gong Show last night generated in total a 0.5 rating, which really is what we expected given the competition and also it airing a new episode after a lot of different repeats. The Gong Show is not renewed as of yet, and there may be a tough decision made here on the part of ABC. While the series itself is relatively inexpensive to make, they do have to afford their “legendary British host Tommy Maitland” in order to keep the show around.

The latest Big Brother eviction rating

We haven’t followed the numbers super-closely this summer, knowing full well that the series is going to be returning for another batch of episodes next summer. Nonetheless, here are some fun facts. Thursday night’s new episode generated in total a 1.8 rating. Not only was that a rise versus the most-recent eviction show despite the competition from other networks, but the eviction shows (so far this season) are actually up almost 5% in the ratings versus last season. For all of the complaining that people have been doing about this season and Paul dominating the game, it’s clearly not having a whole lot of impact on the show itself. People are still watching, and really that is what matters the most to the folks over at CBS.

What do you think about the Zoo season 3 ratings?

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Meanwhile, we also suggest that you head over to the link here in the event you do want to check out our full CarterMatt review for Thursday night’s Zoo season 3 episode. The finale is now coming up right around the corner! (Photo: CBS.)