Sunday’s TV Ratings: ACM Awards Dominate With 12.1 Million Viewers

The Sunday night TV ratings are in and the numbers reveal that the Academy of Country Music Awards dominated the night with 12.1 million viewers.

According to TV Line, the 53rd Academy of Country Music Awards on CBS scored the shows biggest audience since its 2015 broadcast.

Conversely, the big numbers for the ACM Awards means lower numbers all around elsewhere on TV. ABC’s American Idol reboot was one of the victims of low ratings, slipping to only 6.2 million viewers this week, which is a series low for the new incarnation of the franchise.

Several shows, such as Genius Junior and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, remained steady in the ratings from their previous episodes, and a couple of shows, like Timeless and The Simpsons, increased their numbers slightly.

Aside from the ACM Awards, the next big TV winner of the evening was ABC News‘ James Comey interview, which snagged just shy of 10 million viewers.

Comey, the former director of the FBI, has been at the center of quite a lot of controversy lately, with the majority of it involving President Donald Trump.

Sitting down with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, Comey opened up about Trump, and also spoke about his new book, A Higher Loyalty.

When asked why he even wrote the book in the first place, Comey replied, “I was never going to write a book. But I decided I had to write this one to try and be useful. That was my goal after I was fired, to be useful. And it occurred to me maybe I can be useful by offering a view to people, especially to young people, of what leadership should look like and how it should be centered on values.”

Stephanopoulos asked the former FBI director to lay out qualities of an ethical leader, which Comey then detailed. “First and foremost, it’s someone who realizes that lasting values have to be at the center of their leadership. Whether they’re in government or in the private sector or leading a university, they have to focus on things like fairness and integrity and, most of all, the truth,” he said. “That the truth matters.”

Eventually getting around to speaking about Trump directly, Stephanopoulos inquired as to why the FBI opened an investigation into his 2016 election campaign.

“Well– to be more clear, we opened an investigation into whether there were any Americans associated in any way with the Trump campaign who were working with Russia as part of Russia’s effort to influence our election,” Comey explained. “I likened President Trump in the book to a forest fire. Going to do tremendous damage. Going to damage those important norms. But a forest fire gives healthy things a chance to grow that had no chance before that fire.”