• by Wayne Friedman , September 17, 2012

Although NBC still scored big on Sunday thanks to NFL football, the race for Sunday got closer when looking at preliminary results.

NBC registered a Nielsen preliminary 6.5 rating/17 share among 18-49 viewers -- down over 20% from the 7.8/21 for the opening week of TV's top-rated series, "Sunday Night Football."

CBS was able to gain some -- just about a full rating point -- a result of its own NFL football coverage in the late afternoon which boosted its early evening shows, especially "60 Minutes," which climbed to a 3.2/9 from a 2.1/5, and "Big Brother" which scored a 2.3/6 -- up from a 2.1/5. 

This was the first Sunday of CBS's half-hour shifting of its prime-time schedule -- all to avoid the confusion over start times due to NFL afternoon programming overruns. Even then, the NFL football extended prime-time coverage, which scored a 6.3/19 and ran from 7 p.m. to 7:37 p.m. Overall it posted a 2.5/7 for the night versus 1.5/4 the week before. 

Fox also had a bit of NFL programming overrun in the early evening, but that didn't give much lift to its prime-time programming efforts for the night versus the NFL early-evening programming coverage of a week ago -- just getting to a 2.0/5, down from a 4.1/11 the week before. After NFL programming. Fox ran reruns of its animated comedy shows.

Both Univision and ABC landed about the same levels as last Sunday -- Univision at a 1.0/3 versus a 1.1/3. ABC came in with identical 0.7/2 numbers for a full night of reruns.

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