“Logo text CBS’ update on Matlock brought in a strong audience for its premiere Sunday night. The legal drama starring Kathy Bates — which shares a name and basic premise with the 1980s-90s series starring Andy Griffith, but not much else — brought in 7.73 million viewers for its debut. Excluding shows that debuted after the Super”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
CBS’ update on Matlock brought in a strong audience for its premiere Sunday night.
The legal drama starring Kathy Bates — which shares a name and basic premise with the 1980s-90s series starring Andy Griffith, but not much else — brought in 7.73 million viewers for its debut. Excluding shows that debuted after the Super Bowl, that’s the largest series premiere audience for a CBS show in more than five years (since The Code followed an NCIS episode in April 2019).
The 7.73 million viewers also would have ranked in the top five among CBS’ same-day audiences for scripted shows last season (again, not including the post-Super Bowl premiere for Tracker).
Matlock turned in the biggest same-day audience among the handful of network shows that had season or series premieres last week (the Nielsen-measured 2024-25 season officially begins Monday). Among the others, ABC’s Dancing With the Stars drew the biggest total audience (4.97 million viewers), a little ahead of Survivor (4.72 million) on CBS. The two shows tied for the top rating among adults 18-49 at 0.73, equivalent to about 980,000 people in that age range.
High Potential followed DWTS on ABC Sept. 17 with 3.59 million viewers, a good bit ahead of The Good Doctor’s same-day average (2.48 million) in the 10 p.m. Tuesday spot last spring.
Ratings for the premiere of Rescue: Hi-Surf on Fox Sunday — which followed the network’s NFL doubleheader — weren’t available at publication time. Earlier in the month, the network’s animated series Universal Basic Guys premiered to 4.03 million viewers with an NFL lead-in but dropped under 1 million for its second episode.
Also over the weekend, The CW’s first broadcast of NASCAR’s Xfinity Series averaged 906,000 viewers Friday night, the network’s best showing in eight months.
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