Friday 01/06/12 - FOX's Cotton Bowl Leads a Strong Friday Lineup

Entering the final week of college football bowl games, FOX's coverage of the 2012 Cotton Bowl (2.47 A18-49 Live Rating) between the #6 Arkansas Razorbacks and #8 Kansas State Wildcats garnered the largest A18-49 audience Friday night, despite this year's game declining 20% from last year's contest, which featured the #11 LSU Tigers and #17 Texas A&M Aggies.

Following FOX, Univision's fresh lineup of Familia con Suerte (1.46), Que No Podia Amar (1.65) and Rosa de Guadalupe (1.18) gave the network a second place finish, improving slightly from a week ago among A18-49 viewers.

For the first time in over a month, CBS also rolled out a full Friday night schedule of original programming, experiencing double-digit percent improvement among A18-49 with A Gifted Man (1.25) at 8pm, CSI: NY (1.51) at 9pm and Blue Bloods (1.52) at 10pm from their respective episodes on 12/02/11.

Though ABC also featured all new episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition at 8pm (1.30) and 9pm (1.48) and 20/20 at 10pm (1.23), the network still trailed CBS by 7% among A18-49 viewers, despite each program drawing greater viewership than their previous airings a few weeks ago.

Fueled by the one-hour series finale of Wizards of Waverly Place (1.59), Disney reported the largest A18-49 cable audience of the evening, with the program reporting significant improvement over the show's season 3 finale on 10/15/10. New episodes of Gold Rush (1.40) and Flying Wild Alaska (0.69) gave Discovery the second biggest A18-49 cable ratings on the night, ahead of both NBC and The CW.

Sandwiching new episodes of Chuck (0.75) and Dateline NBC (1.23) around a repeat of Grimm (0.58), NBC landed higher than only The CW's lineup of Nikita (0.42) and Supernatural (0.58) among A18-49, with the latest airings on the former network reporting greater viewership growth than those on the latter.

Source: Nielsen, based on Live data