Mavs punch out Spurs, competing programming

Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Tues., April 28)

by Ed Bark of UncleBarky.com

Consider the bandwagon fully loaded.

The Dallas Mavericks' big win in San Antonio Tuesday night toasted all competing programming and gave TXA21 its biggest audience in years. TNT also chipped in, leaving 10 p.m. local newscasts with mostly leftovers.

The game started late at 8:44 p.m. and ended at 11:08 p.m., so we'll reflect that actual running time in our ratings calculations. Here's how many D-FW viewers watched the Mavs close out the Spurs in Game 5 of their first-round playoff series:

TXA21 -- 425,152

TNT -- 159,432

That's a grand total of 584,584 viewers, easily the biggest audience for the Mavericks-Spurs series. TXA21 viewership peaked between 11 and 11:15 p.m. (Nielsen measures audiences in 15-minute increments), when 551,369 viewers had the game on their home screens. TNT's ratings were highest between 9 and 9:15 p.m. (245,791 viewers).

Mavs-Spurs didn't have to compete directly against Fox's American Idol performance show, which had 451,724 viewers in easily winning the 7 to 8 p.m. slot.

ABC's Dancing with the Stars results show had 312,221 viewers in the 8 p.m. hour, losing to a competing new episode of CBS' The Mentalist (338,793 viewers).

After that it was all Mavs. So much so that the 10 to 10:30 p.m. audience on TXA21 alone (438,438 viewers) more than doubled the tally for WFAA8's 10 p.m. newscast, which had 205,933 viewers in beating its rivals on Fox4, NBC5 and CBS11.

CBS11 anchor Doug Dunbar knew how the bread was buttered. He plugged the Mavs and Spurs -- "You can see that game on TXA21" -- just after Babe Laufenberg completed his sports segment.

"Right after our newscast," anchor Karen Borta cautioned to no avail. TXA21 is CBS11's sister station, so Dunbar wasn't committing treason or anything.

In other local news derby results, WFAA8 also ran first at 10 p.m. among 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming. (First, that is, among the four competing newscasts only.)

NBC5 swept the 6 a.m. competition, again prevailing over runnerup Fox4.

WFAA8 won in total viewers at 6 p.m. and finished in a three-way tie for first at 5 p.m. with Fox4 and NBC5.

Fox4 took the 5 and 6 p.m. golds among 25-to-54-year-olds, in each case by unusually comfortable margins.