Sunday Show Ratings: January 1

The first Sunday of 2017 happened to fall on New Year’s Day, which would in theory mean year-over-year declines for the Sunday public affairs show. Not necessarily.

ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos was the most-watched Sunday public affairs show on New Year’s Day 2017 among adults 25-54. In addition, the program posted +4 percent growth in the news demo relative to the same Sunday in 2016, making it the only public affairs show to deliver audience growth relative to Jan. 3, 2016. Overall, This Week is drawing its largest overall audience in 15 years and its strongest news demo audience in 8 years. But unfortunately for This Week, these figures won’t be included in the season average.

CBS’ Face The Nation with John Dickerson, which continues to broadcast its second half-hour across only 58.7 percent of the CBS affiliates, managed to finish No. 1 in total viewers.

Shannon Bream filled in for Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, and viewership dipped from last year. The original broadcast on FOX combined with the two replays on Fox News Channel (2 p.m. and 2 a.m. ET) combined to give the Jan. 1, 2017 edition of Fox News Sunday a total of 2.68 million total viewers and 661,000 from the news demo.

Univision’s Al Punto was the No. 1 Sunday public affairs program among Adults 18-34 this past week, beating all of the English language competition. Al Punto also out-performed Fox News Sunday in Adults 18-49 and 25-54 this past week. Overall, the Jan. 1 episode of Al Punto grew double digits percent in all key viewer demographics, including a +38 percent year-over-year bump in millennial viewers.

Editor’s note: Due to New Year’s holiday, each of the English language public affairs programs was coded as specials.  Special telecasts of those shows are not included in the season averages. 

The numbers for January 1, 2017:

*Al Punto numbers will be added as they become available