CBS’s “60 Minutes” drew a bigger audience than it did a year ago but lost some steam without its usual football lead-in, according to Nielsen figures for the Sept. 20 broadcast.
The episode, which featured Patrick Clancy’s first television interview since the mistrial in his ex-wife Lindsay Clancy’s murder case, averaged 6.77 million viewers and roughly 1.1 million adults 25-54, the core demographic for news programming. Both figures topped the newsmagazine’s second episode of last season, which drew 6.45 million viewers and about 915,000 in the demo, marking gains of 5 percent and 18 percent respectively. Still, the broadcast slipped from the previous week, when “60 Minutes” benefited from a much larger audience flowing in directly from NFL coverage.
That lead-in effect was evident elsewhere on the schedule. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” pitting the Indianapolis Colts against the Kansas City Chiefs, pulled in 24.3 million viewers across the network and Peacock, the strongest week-two performance for the franchise since 2015. The mismatch between that audience and the one that stuck around for CBS’s public-affairs program underscores how much NFL viewership continues to anchor Sunday night ratings across the broader television landscape, even for competing networks’ entertainment and news programming.
The Clancy interview itself carried unusual weight for a “60 Minutes” segment. Correspondent Ross Douthat spoke with Clancy about the January 2023 killings of his three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, at the hands of his then-wife, whose trial ended in a mistrial earlier this month after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict on charges that included an insanity defense tied to postpartum psychosis. Clancy’s current wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, a New York-based fertility specialist he married in April, appeared alongside him and pushed back on what she described as distorted public narratives about their relationship.
Nielsen’s linear numbers typically undercount total audience, since they exclude delayed viewing on Paramount+ and other streaming platforms that increasingly shape a broadcast’s full reach in the days following its initial air date.
