The 2025-26 TV season is in the books, and it was another one of those seasons that warrants a standalone post before starting on The Breakdown, our annual journey through the networks' schedules. I'm gonna try to keep this to three broad points and be brief, because all I really have to offer are my own observations of the Live+SD numbers. If anyone has seen articles elsewhere that add to or contradict these points, I would love to hear about them, because there's a good chance I missed them. Here we go!
1. The DWTS Problem
The first broad point is that, after literally decades of hearing people fraught over the ratings say, "maybe this is the year the ratings will level off," this might be the first time in ages that they kinda did:
| Year | LeAv | y2y |
|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | 1.22 | -16% |
| 2017-18 | 1.10 | -11% |
| 2018-19 | 0.95 | -13% |
| 2019-20 | 0.82 | -14% |
| 2020-21 | 0.64 | -21% |
| 2021-22 | 0.51 | -21% |
| 2022-23 | 0.43 | -16% |
| 2023-24 | 0.38 | -11% |
| 2024-25 | 0.32 | -16% |
| 2025-26 | 0.30 | -6% |
The league average as I calculate it was just -6% in the 2025-26 regular season, the smallest drop in 20 years! So how did we get to this point? If you look at the show averages, one show really sticks out above the rest. Dancing with the Stars averaged an insane 1.36 in the demo, good for a 455 Plus and nearly double its Plus from last season. That's not just #1 in this season but #1 in the entire A18-49+ era for broadcast TV by a very wide margin. It towers over season 50 of Survivor from this same season (317), which was itself one of the strongest entertainment seasons of the entire era. (DWTS does have some entertainment competitors on cable, though; the biggest The Walking Dead seasons were in this vicinity, and the final season of Game of Thrones (549) was noticeably higher.)
What happened? Was it just a two decades-old reality show suddenly becoming an unprecedented phenomenon? Probably so, to some extent! I'm not trying to take away from its achievements here. However... while I haven't ever seen this officially reported out (please let me know if you have!) it seems to be widely assumed that the DWTS numbers include not just its ABC airing but also its simulcast on Disney+. This is strongly corroborated in the preliminary "fast nationals" for the show, which had highly irregular upward adjustments all season long, as you can see in the SpotVault. By the last month of the season, the show was consistently finishing at double its preliminary number or more! The prelims are giving you a picture of just the ABC airing, and the assumption is the finals are adding in the Disney+ viewing.
There are a couple issues here. It's worth asking if this simulcast number is a fair way of assessing the true strength of DWTS itself. We'll get to that one more in The Breakdown. For purposes of this post, the real question is whether these simulcast numbers are distorting the entirety of the "league average." Is it fair to set a standard for broadcast TV that includes a bunch of viewing from outside broadcast TV?
Essentially you're taking the already megahit DWTS prelims (223 Plus), and adding in another megahit in the finals adjustments (232 Plus) essentially for "free." The effect is pretty meaningful. If we were to set DWTS' ratings at the prelims, rather than the finals, that takes the league average from the current .299 all the way down to .288. That -6% year-to-year trend becomes a -9% year-to-year trend. In other words, out of that entire .299 league average for the full season across the whole big four, a full hundredth of that (almost 4%) was just Disney+ DWTS viewers!
While it might "feel" more reasonable to simply set DWTS at its more down-to-earth prelim ratings for league average purposes, I'm not sure that's fair either. The show would adjust up somewhat even without the simulcast, and that's not even getting into the question of whether the Disney+ audience is cannibalizing the ABC one. Though the Disney+ audience skews much, much younger (its adjustments are far smaller by percentage in total viewers) and is probably separate to a large extent, it may well have some extra ABC audience if it were the only source in town.
It feels like the "true" answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but actually estimating where that is would be pretty unscientific. It's also a bit of a dangerous precedent to start using prelims or some fraction of the adjustment, because what if the prelims aren't available in the future? So unless someone can convince me otherwise, I'm inclined to just swallow this inflation. At least it'll be baked in going forward, so the year-to-year effects should be tempered beyond this year.
2. The Smaller Pie
One of the most noteworthy trends in the 2025-26 data is just how few hours actually went into the "league average." This season set a record low for how much of the total primetime real estate went to original, non-sports series, and it wasn't that close:
| Year | Originals | Repeats | Specials | Movies | Sports | O+R |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | 65% | 16% | 6% | 3% | 10% | 81% |
| 2017-18 | 65% | 17% | 5% | 2% | 12% | 82% |
| 2018-19 | 64% | 19% | 5% | 1% | 11% | 83% |
| 2019-20 | 61% | 21% | 7% | 2% | 9% | 82% |
| 2020-21 | 55% | 24% | 6% | 2% | 12% | 80% |
| 2021-22 | 61% | 20% | 5% | 2% | 12% | 81% |
| 2022-23 | 61% | 20% | 5% | 2% | 12% | 81% |
| 2023-24 | 53% | 25% | 5% | 3% | 14% | 78% |
| 2024-25 | 55% | 21% | 6% | 2% | 16% | 76% |
| 2025-26 | 48% | 22% | 4% | 2% | 23% | 70% |
It's not hard to figure out where all this real estate is going. Sports, which was in the single digits for the first 17 years of the era, inched up into the low-teens for most of the last ten years, then exploded into the mid-teens and now the low-20s with the NBA returning to NBC. 48% originals is unheard of across the whole era, but 70% for all series programming (originals + repeats) was actually something we saw all the way back at the very beginning of the era... when airing theatrical movies was a much more viable programming strategy.
Like with the DWTS thing, I'm mostly pointing this out to ask if it's inflating the league average to calculate it out of a smaller pool of shows. From tinkering around a bit, the answer I'm coming to is... maybe a little, but not to an immediately alarming extent. For example, I zeroed out the originals NBC aired last year (2024-25) on its NBA nights (Sunday and Tuesday) this year, since those two nights account for the majority of the drop-off in original real estate. And that only made about a 1% difference in the trend, far less than the DWTS effect.
For one more angle, here's the median y2y decline for scripted shows on the big four. I think this is always a solid "are scripted shows getting distorted by the league average" metric.
| Year | y2y |
|---|---|
| 2016-17 | -24% |
| 2017-18 | -22% |
| 2018-19 | -22% |
| 2019-20 | -23% |
| 2020-21 | -25% |
| 2021-22 | -21% |
| 2022-23 | -21% |
| 2023-24 | -20% |
| 2024-25 | -18% |
| 2025-26 | -14% |
The point here is that while the league average decline was much smaller than the norm, the scripted shows' declines was also quite a bit smaller than the norm. Maybe you'd expect the scripted shows to do a hair better, but it doesn't seem to be some massive problem. However, within those y2y numbers were some interesting trends...
3. Winners and Losers in Big Data?
I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, even if you fully accounted for the potential inflations in the first two points above, you're still looking at a -9% or -10% season for the league average, which would still be the smallest drop in the last 14 years. This might be the ratings "finally leveling off" or it might be about Nielsen's change in methodology, to the so-called "Big Data + Panel."
I'm not gonna sit here and pretend to be an expert in what changed in the methodology, but I have gleaned one thing from listening to some sports media folks in terms of the ratings themselves. While the changes were perceived to be a boon for the ratings on average, they were not homogenous. Within the more favorable environment, there were winners and losers. (In particular, I remember hearing that some NASCAR people thought they were getting shafted in the new numbers.)
So, in that context, I looked at the year-to-year trends across the scripted programs on broadcast TV and wondered if there were "Big Data" winners and losers there, as well. The one that really stands out is how the CBS drama department, whose robustness I raved about last summer, was borderline dead on arrival in 2025-26. There were a lot of bad trends pretty much across the board, but the ones that really stuck out to me were Matlock (which seemed to be on fire at the end of last season, then had a 117 -> 83 sophomore slump) and Fire Country (which dropped to a 70 Plus after three straight years above the league average).
On the other hand, while the sample size is kinda small, you can probably make the case that the comedies were winners, relatively speaking. You kinda had the reverse of Matlock with sophomores like St. Denis Medical and Shifting Gears, shows that many expected would slump but held up swimmingly. Veterans like The Neighborhood and Abbott Elementary also did better trend-wise than pretty much any returning drama. And a particularly striking one was the Fox Sunday cartoons, which had significant improvement particularly in the winter/spring periods after the NFL was over. Maybe that was just hype from American Dad! returning, but it fit with the larger trend.
Again, there's not really any adjustment that can be made here. It is what it is, and we just have to hope that the numbers are more accurate after all the changes. I just wanted to signal to keep these trends in mind when looking at individual shows grade-wise. While we can't truly confirm whether it's a causal relationship (unless anyone reading this has sources that say otherwise!), I've always tried to keep the broader environment in mind. So I will probably be a little less harsh with some of the dramas than their year-to-year Plus numbers warrant.
That's it for today! Please let me know if you have anything that might shed some light on these issues. Unless something throws me off course, we should be kicking off The Breakdown next week!
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