The talk of the TV town on Tuesday night was focused almost solely on ABC’s musical broadcast, The Little Mermaid Live!, starring Auli’i Cravalho, Queen Latifah, John Stamos, Shaggy, and Graham Phillips. The live performance, which also featured segments of Disney’s 1989 animated classic, was far and away the highest rated program in the 18-49 demographic on Tuesday. The Little Mermaid Live! averaged a 2.6 demo rating across its two-hour runtime, with more than 9.5 million live viewers. The musical was a big win for ABC, and it resulted in some pretty low returns for a few rival networks.
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It looks like The CW took the hardest hits on Tuesday as two of its mainstay programs hit series lows. The Flash saw just 1.2 million live viewers and a 0.4 rating in the demo, but Arrow‘s numbers were even more discouraging. Tuesday’s new edition of Arrow received a 0.2 demo rating with 620K viewers overall. It was a rough night for superheroes.
CBS had a much easier time standing up to The Little Mermaid. While it couldn’t touch the live musical’s demo ratings, CBS did have the most-watched program of the night, with 10.74 million people tuning in to the latest episode of NCIS. FBI saw 8.54 million live viewers and a 0.8 rating in the demo, while NCIS: New Orleans delivered a 0.7 rating with 6.61 million viewers.
Over on NBC, The Voice kicked things off with 8.11 million viewers and a 1.3 rating, followed by strong outings for This Is Us (6.69 viewers, 1.3 rating) and New Amsterdam (5.01, 0.7).
The Resident delivered 3.42 viewers for Fox with a 0.7 rating. Those numbers dropped just a little bit for Empire, which held a 0.7 rating and 2.49 million viewers.
ABC followed up The Little Mermaid Live! with a new episode of Emergence, earning a 0.7 rating from 3.47 million viewers.