• by Wayne Friedman , August 13, 2012

NBC finished its London Olympics on another high note -- beating the "Closing Ceremonies" ratings compared to the Beijing Games four years ago.

NBC took in a big Nielsen preliminary 9.1 rating/23 share between 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. for the "XXX Olympics Closing Ceremony."

The network recorded 30.6 million viewers on the 17th day of the big quadrennial event, just a bit under its 31.1 million average over 16 prime-time nights. This bests the Beijing Games by 12%. NBC says the viewer prime-time average was the best for a non-U.S. Summer Olympics in 36 years.

NBC's earlier Sunday night Olympic programming, "London Gold," ran from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., scoring a 5.7/18 and 20.8 million viewers.

CBS continued to offer NBC some big, fresh Sunday night competition with its "Big Brother" reality effort -- although a late afternoon overrun from the "PGA Championship" caused some disruption.

The combined 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. time period "PGA/60 Minutes" took in a 1.0/4. During the next hour -- 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. -- "60 Minutes/Big Brother" scored a 1.9/6. This was down a bit from its last Sunday episode (also against the Olympics), where it took in a 2.1 rating.

While Fox didn't offer up new TV content on Sunday night, its young-skewing, male-oriented animated comedies continued to do sturdy rerun work -- with "Family Guy" at 1.8/5, "American Dad" at 1.6/4, and "The Simpsons" at 1.5/4.

Two new episodes from ABC's reality efforts made no impression -- "Secret Millionaire" at 1.0/3 and "Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition" at 0.9/2.

For the night, for 18-49 viewers, NBC scored a 7.8/22; Fox earned 1.3/4; CBS took a 1.2/3; ABC was at  0.9/3; and Univision had a 0.9/2.

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