How the CBS Evening News Fared in Primetime

All things, including TV ratings, are relative, which may be why it sounds almost positive to hear that CBS’ experiment of running an extra, primetime edition of the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” on Wednesday night came in second in its time slot, behind the Fox powerhouse “American Idol”. True, it was a distant second; Couric had 6.45 million viewers in the overnight ratings according TV Newser, while AI had almost 26 million, per Nielsen. But the second place also means it beat out programming on ABC and NBC. Even if those networks barely try when up against AI, given the third-place position of the program in its normal time slot, that strikes me as actually fairly good.

On the downside, the show got less viewers in primetime than it did in its usual pre-primetime slot, so if the point of this exercise was to see if it could garner more viewers in primetime, it didn’t work. Still, CBS should be commended for giving this a shot. Presumably, those six million viewers were different than the seven million or so that watch the CBS Evening News at its usual time, and with AI as the competition, there’s not much to lose, and possibly some audience to gain.