By David Bauder, Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --CBS’ “60 Minutes” returned this week to a familiar place it hadn’t been accustomed to visiting that much lately: first place in the prime-time television rankings.
The venerable newsmagazine hadn’t finished as the most-watched program of the week since November 2008, when newly elected Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, sat down for the first TV interview since their election.
In its glory years, that was a familiar spot for “60 Minutes.” It finished the entire 1979-80 season as television’s top-ranked show, a feat that it achieved five times. The first week that it topped the ratings came in November 1978 – likely making it the show with the longest gap between the first and most recent first-place showing.
This week’s show featured Scott Pelley’s story about fake news, Anderson Cooper’s report on the Islamic State’s first attack on U.S. soil and Sharyn Alfonsi’s feature about a chess program in rural Mississippi. The content was less important than the show’s lead-in: The newsmagazine started a half hour later than usual because of North Carolina’s regional final victory over Kentucky in men’s basketball, a game that came down to a last-second shot and was watched by 22.1 million people during its final 15 minutes.
It has been a positive season for “60 Minutes,” which is up about 2 percent in viewership over last year.
CBS easily won the week in primetime, averaging 7.4 million viewers. NBC had 5.6 million, ABC had 4.4 million, Fox had 2.8 million, Univision had 1.7 million, Telemundo had 1.31 million, the CW had 1.3 million and ION Television had 1.2 million.
TBS was the week’s most popular cable network, reaching 3.27 million in prime-time with the help of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Fox News Channel had 2.51 million, MSNBC had 1.77 million, HGTV had 1.63 million and USA had 1.62 million.
NBC’s “Nightly News” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8 million viewers. ABC’s “World News Tonight” was second with 7.8 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 6.4 million viewers.
Below are primetime viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for March 20-26. Listings include the week’s ranking and viewership.
1. “60 Minutes,” CBS, 14.7 million.
2. “Dancing With the Stars,” ABC, 12.09 million.
3. “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS, 11.71 million.
4. “The Voice” (Tuesday), NBC, 10.84 million.
5. “The Voice” (Monday), NBC, 10.74 million.
6. “The Walking Dead,” AMC, 10.54 million.
7. NCAA Basketball: UCLA vs. Kentucky, CBS, 10 million.
8. “Little Big Shots,” NBC, 9.81 million.
9. “NCIS,” CBS, 9.36 million.
10. NCAA Basketball: Kansas vs. Oregon, TBS, 9.31 million.
11. “Madam Secretary,” CBS, 8.77 million.
12. “Survivor,” CBS, 8.1 million.
13. “Empire,” Fox, 7.95 million.
14. “Grey’s Anatomy,” ABC, 7.8 million.
15. “Criminal Minds,” CBS, 7.47 million.
16. “Chicago Fire,” NBC, 7.21 million.
17. NCAA Basketball: Michigan vs. Oregon, CBS, 7.13 million.
18. “Bull,” CBS, 7.02 million.
19. NCAA Basketball: Purdue vs. Kansas, CBS, 6.62 million.
20. “NCAA Studio Show,” TBS, 6.52 million.
Review: Director John Crowley’s “We Live In Time”
It's not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In "We Live In Time," filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s.
Everyone starts to think about the idea of time, and not having enough of it to do everything they want, at some point. But it seems to hit a lot of us very acutely in that tricky, lovely third decade. There's that cruel biological clock, of course, but also careers and homes and families getting older. Throw a cancer diagnosis in there and that timer gets ever more aggressive.
While we, and Tobias (Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), do indeed live in time, as we're constantly reminded in big and small ways — clocks and stopwatches are ever-present, literally and metaphorically — the movie hovers above it. The storytelling jumps back and forth through time like a scattershot memory as we piece together these lives that intersect in an elaborate, mystical and darkly comedic way: Almut runs into Tobias with her car. Their first chat is in a hospital hallway, with those glaring fluorescent lights and him bruised and cut all over. But he's so struck by this beautiful woman in front of him, he barely seems to care.
I suppose this could be considered a Lubitschian "meet-cute" even if it knowingly pushes the boundaries of our understanding of that romance trope. Before the hit, Tobias was in a hotel, attempting to sign divorce papers and his pens were out of ink and pencils kept breaking. In a fit of near-mania he leaves, wearing only his bathrobe, to go to a corner store and buy more. Walking back, he drops something in the street and bang: A new relationship is born. It's the... Read More