Ratings: NBC’s ‘Little Big Shots’ surprisingly clobbers ‘Once Upon a Time,’ ‘Quantico,’ others

Who would have anticipated a talent competition featuring kids and Steve Harvey has host would turn out to be a big hit for NBC? “Little Big Shots” can now officially be tabulated as one of the biggest surprise stories of 2016 so far, as the ratings performed significantly better than we ever imagined that they would.

The good news – “Little Big Shots” won the night on broadcast TV with a 2.8 rating in the 18-49 demographic and almost 15 million viewers; it came close to doubling in the demo anything else on primetime TV. It also boosted “The Carmichael Show” (1.5), which returned with an hour of programming that featured a take on Bill Cosby.

The bad news – In the shadow of this show, “Once Upon a Time” (1.3) continues to struggle in the second half of season 5. The series had a little bit of a ratings resurgence when they brought some of the “Frozen” characters into the mix for the first half of season 4, but ever since that point it really has not been able to pick up much in the way of traction.

Also, “Quantico” (1.1) continues to really fail to love up to some of its once-tremendous buzz in the numbers. The show does perform well in DVRs and it did technically win its timeslot, so we suppose that is something. It’s just proving especially difficult these days for network TV to find 10:00 p.m. programming that really manages to score huge numbers. At this point, “The Family” (0.8) would probably be thrilled to get better numbers. At the moment, they may just be happy that they didn’t drop further than they have already.

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