Show trial ratings are in

TV Rating Guide’s Rebecca Bunch posts the ratings for the January 6 Committee’s show trial hearing this past Thursday evening. The headline declares the ratings “decent.”

Well, that is disappointing if accurate. If you take your television viewing from the broadcast networks, however, your only choice was to turn the thing off. The networks graciously handed their prime time slots over to the committee’s motley crew in unison, Soviet style.

Providing a link to the ratings, the Washington Free Beacon adds a poignant twist. Reporter Collin Anderson homes in on CBS (which lagged the field) and finds that CBS’s broadcast of the hearing could not keep up with the rerun of “Young Sheldon” [?] that aired in the same time slot last week:

Just 3.24 million people watched the network’s “Capitol Assault Hearings” coverage Thursday night, according to the TV Ratings Guide. Exactly one week prior, 3.86 million people tuned into CBS to watch a “Young Sheldon” rerun, meaning an old episode of the coming-of-age sitcom garnered roughly 600,000 more viewers than the inaugural hearing.

It gets worse (better):

That gap is even more pronounced for new “Young Sheldon” episodes. More than seven million people, for example, watched the show’s season five finale, titled “A Clogged Pore, a Little Spanish, and the Future,” during CBS’s 8 p.m. slot on Thursday, May 19. Three weeks earlier, 6.9 million people watched a new episode titled, “Uncle Sheldon and a Hormonal Firecracker.”

To be filed under Laughter Is the Best Medicine

FOOTNOTE: Among the columns worth reading on the hearing are Byron York’s “The House committee’s grand unified theory of Jan. 6” and Andrew McCarthy’s “What the January 6 Committee Hearing Left Out” (behind NRO’s paywall).

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