The nation’s fathers spent a lot of time watching the NBA playoffs in May, along with several other dad-coded shows like The Last of Us, Andor, NCIS and The Rookie.
They also watched a ton of Bluey and SpongeBob SquarePants — because as any parent (regardless of gender) knows, the TV is not always under adult control.
Just ahead of Father’s Day, Nielsen has revealed data on the programming dads spent the most time watching in May. Unsurprisingly, the NBA playoffs take up the top three spots — sports programming tends to draw more male-skewing audiences, after all. TNT’s coverage of the playoffs’ second round drew the most viewing time in May with just over 1 billion minutes of viewing.
TNT’s round one NBA games and ESPN’s round two coverage come in second and third at 663 million and 525 million minutes of viewing. In fourth place is Bluey, with 462 million minutes of watch time among dads (at least those between the ages of 25 and 49 with kids living at home, the parameters of the Nielsen survey). SpongeBob SquarePants (208 million viewing minutes) and Ms. Rachel (199 million) also make the top 20, strongly implying a lot of co-viewing among parents and kids.
How strongly? Nielsen also compiled data on men in the same age range without kids in their homes, and where Bluey ranks fourth among fathers, it’s 570th among guys without kids at 27 million minutes. Ms. Rachel ranks 1,178th among childless men 25-49, compiling 13 million minutes of viewing in May. (SpongeBob’s split is a little more even, as men without kids watched 113 million minutes of the show that a significant number of them likely grew up watching.)
Among the other shows that rank highly among dads and their child-free counterparts are Netflix’s You and The Four Seasons, animated series Family Guy and American Dad! and long-running sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Friends. The no-kids set of men watched more TV generally, clocking 846 million more minutes of the 20 shows in Nielsen’s report. Take away the three kids’ shows, and the difference grows to more than 1.5 billion minutes.
Notably not among the top 20 dad programs are any History Channel documentaries, Bosch or The Shawshank Redemption (to be fair, the latter hasn’t been in heavy cable rotation recently and is only available as a VOD rental on a few streamers). Their absence may be partly down to the demographics in Nielsen’s study, as those quintessential Dad Shows might skew toward fathers above 50.
The limited time frame for the data also means that male-skewing shows like Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and Landman don’t show up here, nor does the king of all sports programming, the NFL. A season-long study would definitely would include some of those shows.
The top 20 shows for dads (and their equivalent totals for men without kids) in May are below.
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