Tuesday Night TV Ratings: ‘This Is Us,’ ‘Rudolph’ Lead the Evening

The Tuesday night TV ratings are in, and they reveal that This Is Us and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer led the evening.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, This Is Us was the big winner for the night in scripted projects, bringing in nearly 9 million viewers and seeing its ratings rise from the previous episode’s series low.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came close to the drama series, however, landing just over eight million viewers, which is up slightly from its 2017 airing.

The number one show for the night overall was NBC‘s The Voice, which held onto almost 9.5 million watchers.

This Is Us has kept fans clinging on by using flash-forwards that have been incredibly mysterious. The most recent episode shared some revelations in those time-jumps that certainly surprised fans, and will likely help to boost ratings when the show returns form its winter hiatus.

The flash-forwards fans have been seeing, however, will be as far into the future as the series goes, according to what creator Dan Fogelman told Entertainment Weekly in a past interview.

“I don’t imagine us going past this time period in the future so in terms of a timeline, this is our ending timeline,” he explained. “But we may have other past timelines we’re going to introduce in the course of the series, and also other future story lines that we might introduce as well.”

“It’s a mystery that won’t play out over seasons,” Fogelman added, referring to the mysterious “her” that fans recently discovered the identity of. “There will be answers given in the course of the season.”

“Part of the fun of any family is looking at somebody in certain time frame or a family in a present-day time frame and hypothetically jumping forward 15 years and [seeing] who’s still in the picture, who’s not in the picture anymore, who has become ill or other,” he continued. “We’ll be slowly getting pieces by process of elimination or more questions…until we get to the answer — and not string it out too long.”

He also confessed that the current big mystery the show has set up does have a purpose and is not there just to be arbitrarily misleading.

“The mystery is actually informing a lot of stuff that has happening in the present day as well,” Fogelman admitted. “The interesting part is in the course of the season as we mention this mystery, we’re going to be putting a lot of those things in the stories that it’s not. So it’s not just one — estrangement, death, love, marriage — all those things are part of jumping a family [deep] into the future.”

“The question isn’t just who’s estranged, or who’s in prison, or any of the other theories that I’ve heard from people, it’s about where are all the other characters at that point in their lives,” he went on to say. “And that’s going to be also spoken to by what their stories are in the present day. So that’s really exciting for us as well.”

This Is Us returns with new episodes Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.