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*They may have become instant Internet memes on New Year’s Eve, but Mariah Carey’s tea-less return to “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest” and Steve Harvey’s Winter Players Ball outfit on FOX each helped to deliver big ratings.
ABC’s ‘Rockin’ Eve’ averaged 10.5 million viewers and a 3.0 rating/12 share in the adults 18-49 demographic, a spike of more than 50% in both measures over last year’s telecast, for the 8-10 p.m. ET portion of the annual special.
From 10-11 p.m., the crowd swelled to 15.7 million viewers and a whopping 5.2/20 in the key demo — up 35% and 39%, respectively, from last year. Those numbers marked the highest scores in that hour since the Seacrest edition of the “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” special bowed in 2000.
Specific viewership figures for the 11 p.m.-midnight hour when Carey performed won’t be available until Tuesday. But it’s clear that viewers tuned in to see how Carey would redeem herself after last year’s technical problem caused her to stop performing mid-song.
Meanwhile, Fox also saw a big bounce in viewership with Harvey hosting a live special from Times Square. Compared to last year’s Pitbull-hosted event from Miami, “Fox’s New Year’s Eve With Steve Harvey” attracted nearly five times the crowd (5.8 million from 8-10 p.m. compared to 1.4 million).
It didn’t hurt that an NFL overrun fed a much larger audience into Harvey’s special than repeats of drama series “Bones” and “Lethal Weapon” did last year for Pitbull. Preliminary Nielsen estimates indicate at that Harvey had a lead-in of at least 10 million viewers from “The OT on Fox” in the 7 p.m. ET hour.
The Harvey special pulled in a healthy 1.8/8 in adults 18-49 from 8-10 p.m. Fox carried the live Harvey special from 8-10 p.m. After an hour break for local news on Fox affiliate stations, Harvey returned for the big countdown to 2018 from 11 p.m.-12:19 a.m. Ratings for the final segment won’t be available until Tuesday.
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