‘This Is Us’ Stays on Top With Season 3 Premiere While Newcomers ‘FBI’ and ‘New Amsterdam’ Debut With Big Numbers

The Tuesday night TV ratings are in, and they reveal that the This Is Us season three premiere kept the show on too while newcomers FBI and New Amsterdam debuted with big numbers as well.

According to Variety, This Is Us’ season three premiere earned a 2.9 in the ratings, which is lower than the season two premiere earned, but still enough to make it the number one show of the night.

New Amsterdam directly followed This Is Us, and scored a 1.9 in the ratings — solid for a brand new series.

Brand new series FBI grabbed a 1.3 in the ratings, which is is notable since it’s lead-in series NCIS had a 1.4 rating. This means that the freshman series retained nearly all of its predecessors viewers.

It’s likely no surprise to most that This Is Us was the highest-rated show of the evening, as the series has been a ratings juggernaut since it debuted in 2016. During a Deadline interview in June, series creator Dan Fogelman opened up about the show and shared that it was originally written to be a film.

“A few years back I was considering it as a next feature. I actually wrote about 75 pages,” he admitted. “Initially it had about 7 characters all sharing the same birthday, and the reveal at the end of the film was going to be that the Jack and Rebecca characters were giving birth to sextuplets 36 years earlier. Kind of a Sixth Sense-type ending with babies.”

Fogelman went on to reveal that the show/film really did not have “a ton of inspiration,” saying that he just wanted to sit down and write something about people; people I knew.”

“I was in my late 30s at the time—about 38—and I was struck by how wildly different the lives of my peers could be, even though we were all the same age,” he added. “I had friends who were married, some single. Some had preteen children, others none. Some were satisfied in their careers, others less so.”

“Some had experienced great loss—of parents, of friends—others hadn’t even lost a grandparent. And I thought, I’m going to write something about all these people, all exactly the same age and born on the same day,” Fogelman continued. “Halfway through I thought, Huh, maybe one story is the parents of all the others. Then I just sat down and wrote.”

This Is Us airs on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.