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Local Nielsen ratings snapshot (Monday, March 25) -- return of The Voice also puts NBC back among living

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom
NBC’s down-and-out midseason took a decided upturn Monday night with the return of The Voice against potent competition on all three of its main rivals.

Two new judges, Usher and Shakira, joined the mix to the tune of 468,126 D-FW viewers in the 7 to 9 p.m. slot. That’s far better than Fox’s American Idol’s performance this season. And among advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-olds, The Voice soared well beyond even AMC’s The Walking Dead. An off-the-charts 258,341 viewers in this age range made The Voice their choice, with a peak crowd of 299,804 for the closing 15 minutes.

ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and Fox’s The Following both had respectable numbers in the total viewers measurement. But their 268,484 viewers apiece were minuscule compared to The Voice.

CBS’ first-run sitcom lineup for the most part lagged, with How I Met Your Mother and Rules of Engagement placing third ahead of Fox’s Bones from 7 to 8 p.m. before 2 Broke Girls and Mike & Molly fell to fourth.

Fox’s pair of dramas had the fewest 18-to-49-year-olds from 7 to 9 p.m. among the Big Four networks, with Dancing slipping to third place.

NBC’s other big new returnee, Revolution, plummeted to 192,758 total viewers in the 9 p.m. hour. That put it in third place behind ABC’s Castle (254,715 viewers) and CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 (220,294). But Revolution edged Castle for the 9 p.m. top spot among 18-to-49-year-olds by a score of 95,682 to 89,303.

All of this was bad news for TNT’s Dallas, which had its smallest audience to date in the D-FW market. Doing the best they can without the late Larry Hagman, the remaining Ewings and their rivals had just 96,379 viewers in the 8 p.m. hour. Only 41,462 were in the 18-to-49 motherlode.

Over on KTXD-TV (Ch. 47), the 6 p.m. live edition of Texas Daily had one of its bigger audiences to date. Coming off 34,421 viewers for the preceding 5:30 p.m. rerun of The Rifleman, the baby boomer-aimed news hour held on to 13,768 of ‘em. That’s not a lot. But it beats the “hashmarks” (no measurable audience) Monday for D magazine’s 9 to 11 a.m. menu of D: The Broadcast and D Living. Both programs have very seldom ventured out of this territory since their Feb. 18th debuts.

Another home-grown product, CW33’s struggling, comedy-laced 9 p.m. Nightcap News, showed a pulse with 12,758 viewers in the key 18-to-49 demographic. The program rarely improves on its CW network lead-in, but this time it did better than an 8 p.m. Hart of Dixie rerun.

Here are Monday’s four-way local news derby results.

WFAA8 ran first at 10 p.m. in both total viewers and 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.

Fox4 again swept the 6 a.m. competitions, with WFAA8 teeter-tottering to fourth place finishes in both measurements behind long dormant but slowly gaining CBS11.

CBS11 had the most viewers at 6 p.m., with Fox4 tops among 25-to-54-year-olds. Fox4 logged twin wins at 5 p.m.

D-FW NEWS NOTES:

Former longtime NBC5 anchor Mike Snyder has a bit part -- as a news anchor -- in the opening minutes of the feature film Olympus Has Fallen. And the station’s veteran sports anchor, Newy Scruggs, has been named to host the new weekday Voices of the Game program on NBC Sports Radio.

The show airs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., but NBC Sports Radio does not yet have a station in the D-FW market. Nor is it on satellite radio. So for now, Scruggs’ show can only be heard on nbcsportsradio.com, starting April 1st. His guest host on the Thursday, April 4th show will be former Texas Rangers manager Bobby Valentine.

Scruggs will continue to anchor NBC5’s weekday 6 and 10 p.m. sports segments.

Email comments or questions to: unclebarky@verizon.net