• by Wayne Friedman , January 17, 2011

"The 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards" continued to deliver strong award season TV viewership to NBC. But a big NFL playoff game gave a mid-January Sunday win to CBS.

The NBC show was down a bit, but still earned an impressive Nielsen preliminary 5.2 rating/12 share among 18-49 viewers -- which is the network's highest non-sports 18-49 rating in the time period since last year's "Globes" at a 5.5. The show's total viewers were also up a bit from a year ago (16.998 million from 16.984 million.)

All this helps NBC continue from its just-completed strong "Sunday Night Football" package of NFL games. NBC posted a healthy 18-49 average on the night with a 3.8/10.

Although "Globes" was easily the top-rated entertainment show, CBS was the champ for this night with a full two-rating point win over NBC with a Nielsen 5.8/15.

This came from an major early-evening windfall from the closely battled NFL AFC Divisional playoff game between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots, which took in an expected eye-popping 13.6 rating/35 share among those key 18-49 viewers and 40 million viewers in the 7 p.m. hour.

All this helped float some other CBS boats going into the rest of the night -- "60 Minutes," which ran at 8 p.m., got a big lift with a 3.8/10; "'Undercover Boss' earned a 3.1/8; and "CSI: Miami" took a 2.3/6.

Fox pulled in respectable viewing data for its comedies -- even without its own typically big NFL lead-in. It came in third for the night with a 2.5/6.

The best Fox comedy was "Family Guy" at 9 p.m., at 3.7/9, down from a 4.7 the week before -- all due to a big lead-in on the night from a major NFL playoff game. At 8 p.m., "The Simpsons" were at a 3.1/8 from its nearly doubled 5.7 number of the previous week. The second airing of "Bob Burgers" at 8:30 p.m. slipped almost two full ratings points to a 2.6/6 from a 4.5 rating the week before. "The Cleveland Show" fared a bit better, dropping nine-tenths of a rating point to a 2.7/6.

ABC brought up the rear -- only a 2.1/5 average for the night.

Also against some tough competition, Univision found it rough going at a 0.6/1.