• by Wayne Friedman , September 23, 2013

Two big TV winners on a late September Sunday night were “Sunday Night Football” and the “Emmys."

CBS grabbed strong improving numbers for the “The 65th Prime Time Emmy Awards” -- from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. -- giving the award show its best results in seven years with a Nielsen preliminary 4.9 rating among 18-49 viewers, improving 26% from last year’s results. Younger viewers 18-34 grew as well -- up 50% against a year ago. This year’s telecast pulled in 17.6 million overall viewers.

But NBC’s “Sunday Night Football," featuring the Chicago Bears-Pittsburgh Steelers, still retained its top honors as the best-rated show on Sunday night (and of TV overall) getting to a 6.9 rating/18 share among 18-49 viewers and 18.7 million viewers overall. These results were down about a half a rating point from the week, which reached a 7.4 rating.

With these two heavyweights, all other programming, except for the NBC’s pre-game show and late-afternoon NFL football programming, ran for cover -- in rerun mode.

For the night, NBC was best among 18-49 viewers on average at a 5.5/15, and CBS was at a 4.8/13. Way down the list in the next three places were Fox, 1.1/3; Univision, at 1/0/3; and ABC, at a 0.6/2.

NBC was just ahead of CBS in terms of younger viewers -- at a 4.6/14 to a 4.4/14. But CBS was just ahead of NBC in total viewers -- 16.3 million to 15.2 million.

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