Courtesy USA Today

(January 5, 2011) How's this for the power of NFL games? For the first time, a sports TV series, NBC's Sunday Night Football, is the most-watched TV show in prime time, ahead of any reality, drama or comedy series this season. SNF averaged 21.8 million viewers, up 12% from last year. That gave the NFL's Sunday prime-time game a higher average viewership than No. 2 Dancing with the Stars (20.5 million), according to NBC. It's the first time a sports series has ranked as the most-watched show from the start of the TV season on Sept. 20 through the end of the NFL regular season.

Of course, SNF still has to beat Fox's American Idol which returns to the air Jan. 19-20. But Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports and Olympics and executive producer of SNF, says its the first time in 40 years a sport series hit No. 1 in prime time. Even ABC's original Monday Night Football, which he started working on with TV pioneer Roone Arledge in 1970, never made it, he says. SNF finished No. 3 behind Idol and Dancing during the last full TV season which ran from Sept. 20 through late May.

The achievement means "a lot," says Ebersol. "To finally see (the NFL) become TV's No. 1 program is unbelievable. It's never happened with any sports series."

Ebersol says 14 of NBC's 18 games this season were still in doubt at the two-minute warning. In a statement, Howard Katz, the NFL's senior vice president of media and operations, says the audience growth is a "testament to the great action on the field featuring close games with exciting and unpredictable finishes — coupled with the outstanding work and promotion by our partners."

So what's behind the growth? Ebersol says it started when Katz started building the "spine" of the league's TV schedule around CBS and Fox's heavily watched late afternoon Sunday games as well as NBC's SNF and ESPN's MNF prime-time games. The result? All five of the NFL TV partners — CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and its own NFL Network — are posting big audience gains for the last three years.

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