Jimmy Fallon Wins Premiere Week Ratings, Jimmy Kimmel Celebrates Biggest Ever Opening Week

NBC’s Tonight Show dominated the ratings for the opening week of the 2014-15 TV season —   with a demo audience (1.382 million) that’s up 15% over its year ago Premiere Week,  and an overall crowd (3.872 million) that climbed 5%.  It was Tonight’s  best opening week since ’08.“Tonight” averaged 1.382 million adults 18-49.  The year-ago week was 1.205 million, up +15%

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live celebrated its biggest ever Premiere Week audience (2.893 million), jumping 19% in total viewers over Premiere Week ’13. Kimmel’s show grew for the 2nd straight year in Adults 18-49 (872,000) to its strongest opening-week performance in 7 years.  Once again the show enjoyed the Shonda Rhimes Bump on Thursday, when it dominated Tonight Show by 22% in total viewers and 15% in the demo, following a primetime of Rhimes’ drama debuts and a guest appearance by a Scandal star. Thursday’s JKL  drew the biggest-ever single-day overall crowd or any Kimmel broadcast in late-night —
4.141 million viewers —  though it got edged out by Tonight’s Monday broadcast (4.163 million).

And, congratulations to Craig Ferguson on winning his very last Premiere Week for CBS late night in overall audience — not bad for a “micro-niche” show. Ferguson clocked 1.51 million viewers while NBC’s Seth Meyers -hosted Late Night logged 1.50 million. It’s especially impressive given that Ferguson’s lead-in, Dave Letterman, lost to Fallon for the week by  1.134 million viewers.  Meyers edged out Ferguson by about 100,000 demo viewers — a lead Ferguson cut in half,  to 50,000 viewers, in the younger, 18-34 age bracket. Ferguson’s leaving his late night gig at the end of the calendar year.