Young Sheldon ratings surge on Thanksgiving; Arrow, Supernatural plummet

As it turns out there is a path to having good television ratings on thanksgiving — much of it begins with airing following a big NFL game.

The ratings are now officially in for much of network prime-time and the biggest surprise comes via Young Sheldon surging to a 2.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic. This is the best rating for the show since it moved to Thursday nights, even though it interestingly set a new viewership low with 11.3 million watching. The Thanksgiving crowd was just much younger, likely because young viewers were away from their typical routines and may have opted to spend Thanksgiving night with the TV on while visiting some of their loved ones.

Young Sheldon was actually behind a repeat of The Big Bang Theory (2.9) for the #1 show of the night outside of football, but the bigger ratings carried over to all of the shows that followed in between Mom (1.8), Life in Pieces (1.3), and SWAT (1.1). We’re not going to be one to ever question again CBS making the decision to program Thanksgiving night, provided of course that they’ve got the afternoon game featuring the Dallas Cowboys. The funny thing here to us is the the Cowboys got blown to pieces by the Los Angeles Chargers and they still found a way to be a huge viewership bump to some of the shows airing after the fact.

The CBS Thursday lineup is now pretty stable — both Young Sheldon and SWAT officially have full seasons.

Bad move, CW

Now, let’s talk about a network that should never make the decision to program on a Thanksgiving night ever again. The CW chose to try and air a lineup including Supernatural and Arrow, and the end result of it blew up in their face dramatically. Both of these shows drew some of their worst ratings ever in 0.3 ratings in the demo. We don’t foresee it hurting either of their long-term renewal odds, but we do think that this will strongly make the network reconsider any future attempts to program on Thanksgiving again. It felt like this move was mostly brought on to keep Arrow at the same place in production as the other superhero shows so that the crossover could’ve happened at the same time — while it does make a certain degree of sense, you are still biting the bullet on Arrow having it run an episode, even a holiday one, without a lead-in and when people are off doing other things.

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