An extra-inning contest to open the World Series helped Fox draw its biggest game one audience in three years.
The network averaged 11.48 million viewers for its broadcast of the Philadelphia Phillies’ 6-5, 10-inning victory over the Houston Astros on Friday. That’s up 6 percent over last year’s first game (10.81 million) and the best for a World Series opener since 12.19 million watched game one of the 2019 series. Fox also got a 2.9 rating among adults 18-49 for the game, up about 15 percent year to year.
On the flip side, Friday’s telecast is still the third lowest opening game on record for the World Series, ahead of only the previous two years. (The 2020 series, played after a pandemic-shortened season, holds the all-time low for average viewers across the full series and for each of its six individual games.)
Elsewhere Friday, CBS’ Fire Country continued its solid start with 5.3 million viewers for its fourth episode, on par with the previous week. SWAT (4.63 million viewers) and Blue Bloods (5.68 million) also led everything but Fox’s World Series game in their respective hours. ABC got a bump from Diane Sawyer’s hour-long interview special with Matthew Perry (4.39 million viewers), drawing 950,000 more viewers than Shark Tank’s average in the 8 p.m. hour.
