NFL ratings get a huge boost thanks to Tom Brady's New England return

Among the non-adjusted fast affiliates, last night's NFL Sunday Night Football snared a 6.0 among the coveted 18-49 demographic and about 22 million viewers.

Those results will significantly rise once time zone adjusted data comes in and could end up just shy of an audience of 30 million. Right now, Week 4 of NBC's flagship NFL show is up a massive 58% in the key demo and 62% in viewership in the early numbers over last week's Green Bay Packers' 30-28 win against the San Francisco 49ers on September 26.

That NFL Week 3 gridiron battle went up to 20.2 million viewers on NBC in the final numbers. Looking at the broader landscape, the Total Audience Delivery for the nationally followed Packers and 49ers inched up to 21.1 million when streaming on Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL Digital platforms were added in by the Comcast-owned company.

As things stand right now, it is unlikely that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. New England Patriots game last night will crack the Top 5 Sunday NFL games.

With the Patriots vs. Indianapolis Colts match-up on 4 November 2007 in the number one spot with 33.8 million viewers, the 30 December 2021 game between the Dallas Cowboys and the then Washington Redskins holds the fifth spot with its NFL Sunday Night Football viewership of 30.3 million.

How close last night's NFL Sunday Night Football gets to that exalted list will be known later.

Ratings beyond the NFL

Meanwhile, beyond NFL pro-football, CBS ruled Sunday primetime with the latest installment of 60 Minutes, which earned a 1.5 demo rating and 9.93 million viewers. That provided a generous enough audience for the network's showing of Star Trek, which closed off the evening.

America's Funniest Home Videos returned to ABC on Sunday for its Season 32 premiere (0.4, 4.57M), down just slightly on demo ratings, but up on viewers from its October 2020 opener (0.5, 4.27M). Following the long-running comedy clip show was Celebrity Wheel of Fortune (0.6, 4.48M), which marked the peak for ABC, Supermarket Sweep (0.4, 2.80M) and The Rookie (0.3, 2.98M).

Fox's Sunday primetime peaked with a new episode of The Simpsons, earning a 0.5 demo rating and 1.43 million viewers. The Great North (0.3, 095M) was the network's least-watched and lowest-rated program of the evening.

Keeping CW busy on Sunday night was coverage of the iHeartRadio Music Festival Night 2 (0.4, .34M).

As the numbers show, nothing was even close to top the NFL audience last night. The second most-watched show on television had less than half of the watchers than the NFL's Sunday Night Football. Indeed, that is one more win for Tom Brady's stellar career.

(All statistics seen on Deadline.)