Olympics are unstoppable in DFW

by Ed Bark of of UncleBarky.com

Still on fire, the Summer Games decimated all in their path Monday night to give NBC another mega-ratings boost.

The Olympics averaged 494,427 D-FW homes, peaking at 616,207 between 9:15 and 9:30 p.m. ABC in particular offered scant resistance with a lineup of High School Musical: Get In the Picture (29,227 homes), a pair of Samantha Who? repeats (31,623) and The Mole (41,405).

Advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-olds also flocked to NBC. The Olympics averaged a monster 384,715 viewers in this key demographic.

CBS' Two and a Half Men rerun drew the largest total audience (148,572 homes) opposite the big blast from Beijing. But that was less than one-third of the homes tuned to the Olympics from 8 to 8:30 p.m.

In the local news derby, CBS11 comfortably won a downsized three-way race at 10 p.m. with 133,958 homes. Fox4 countered with a win among 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

NBC5 otherwise ran the table at 6 a.m., and at 5 and 6 p.m. It's the first time in recent memory that WFAA8 went without a gold in any of the four major local news competitions.

NBC5's early evening newscasts should prosper in the ratings during this week and next as warmup acts for the Peacock's prime-time Olympics coverage. It's a good time for rival stations to send their A-list anchors on vacation. All resistance is futile.