Fall 2025’s TV Ratings Shockers: Which Shows Secretly Own Your Binge-Watch Destiny?
Added on November 21, 2025 inTV News Cards
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Remember the good ol’ DVR days? Back in the early 2010s when shows could rack up an extra five million viewers after their initial broadcast thanks to TiVo magic and cable-box playback—ah, simpler times! Fast forward to 2024, and the DVR’s sparkle is fading faster than Mercury in retrograde can mess up your love life. TiVo has quit the set-top box game, and now only a rare few network shows manage to snag 2 million extra eyeballs via DVR within a week. But hey, don’t rush to bury delayed viewing just yet! Streaming has sashayed in like the star of the show, picking up all the slack and reshaping how folks catch their favorite series after airtime. The Nielsen ratings reveal that the top 19 broadcast entertainment series are still building an average bump of nearly 3.85 million viewers in the week following their premiere—half of whom are likely streaming, because who waits around these days? And get this: a quartet of shows is more than doubling their initial audiences, which is like dramatic planetary alignment for TV stats! So, if you thought delayed viewing was as outdated as last season’s fashion, think twice—viewers have just shifted gears, not vanished into the void. Curious to dive deeper into this cosmic shift in how we watch TV? LEARN MORE
In the heyday of DVRs — way back in the olden times, the early and mid-2010s — it was common for some shows at the top of the charts to add 5 million viewers or more to their initial totals over the course of a week via people’s TiVos or cable-box DVRs.
That … is no longer the case. TiVo stopped selling set-top boxes in October, and in the 2024-25 season, only a handful of network series added as many as 2 million viewers via DVR playback in seven days. Cable and satellite systems and other multi-channel providers like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV still let users record and shows to watch later, but as with most things related to linear TV, it’s a declining part of the ecosystem.
However (and maybe read that as if it has an exclamation point after it), that doesn’t mean people have just stopped watching shows after they air. People’s viewing habits have just shifted more to streaming, as chronicled many, many times here.
The latest set of seven-day, multiplatform network ratings from Nielsen show that delayed viewing is far from dead. In fact, the top 19 entertainment series on broadcast networks this season add an average of about 3.85 million viewers after their first airings through streaming and DVRs. Detailed linear vs. streaming breakdowns for the table below weren’t available, but previous data suggests streaming accounts for about half of that total. (CBS’ 60 Minutes also ranks among the top 20 non-sports shows, but as a news program the overwhelming majority of its audience watches when it’s on air.)
Four shows in the top 20 — ABC’s High Potential and 911: Nashville and CBS’ Matlock and Elsbeth — more than double their first-night audiences over a week. Aside from 60 Minutes, every other show in the top 20 grows by at least 42 percent, with most well above 60 percent.
What’s always been true in the 20-odd years Nielsen has tracked delayed viewing is that it’s largely a rich-get-richer scenario. All shows grow with streaming and DVR playback, but the series at the top of the seven-day rankings usually start off in fairly good shape as well. In other words, if Tracker’s same-day viewership were 3 million instead of more than 8 million, it’s unlikely 6 million more viewers would be watching it in the week after.
The same-day to seven-day multiplatform changes for the top 20 non-sports broadcast shows (as of Nov. 9) are below.
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