TV Ratings: ‘East New York’ Is Fall’s Top Series Premiere After Seven Days

October 11, 2022

By Rick Porter

CBS’ first-year drama series East New York plugged seamlessly into the network’s Sunday lineup — and has drawn the biggest seven-day audience of any rookie show in the early going of the 2022-23 season.

A pair of other debuts, CBS’ So Help Me Todd and ABC’s The Rookie: Feds, also put up solid seven-day numbers, and Ghosts opened its second season on CBS as the most watched comedy — passing its lead-in, Young Sheldon.

After a solid initial showing (5.27 million same-day viewers), East New York added 1.9 million viewers over a week to finish with 7.17 million (not including streaming), according to Nielsen’s seven-day tallies for Sept. 26-Oct. 2. That’s the largest audience for any of the seven series debuts in the first two weeks of the season. Network mate So Help Me Todd ranks second among those seven with 6.6 million viewers after a week of delayed viewing, a gain of 1.79 million over its same-day audience.

The Rookie: Feds, meanwhile, started from a smaller base (2.17 million same-day viewers) but nearly doubled that after a week, growing to 4.31 million. ABC says an additional 2 million people watched the premiere via streaming platforms, bringing its seven-day, multi-platform audience to 6.3 million.

As for Ghosts, its 9.23 million viewers after seven days ranks seventh among all network shows (excluding sports pre- and postgame programming), continuing a strong delayed-viewing performance from its first season. The season premiere added 2.77 million viewers, the fifth largest gain of the week. It beat out Young Sheldon (9.11 million) for the most viewers among comedies despite having a same-day audience that was about 400,000 viewers smaller than that of Sheldon’s.

Seven-day Nielsen ratings totals do not include streaming, which makes up a sizable portion of the total audience for entertainment programming. The top 10 broadcast shows (including ties) in the seven-day ratings for Sept. 26-Oct. 2 are below.

Total Viewers

Adults 18-49