CHICAGO _ Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls returned to TV on Sunday night, via ESPN's "The Last Dance," still dominant in the Chicago Nielsen ratings but nowhere near as potent as back when they were actually winning championships.
ESPN and ESPN2, which simultaneously ran a version with profanities edited out, combined for a 12.6 household rating in the Chicago market for Episode 1, which represents 12.6% of market or roughly 410,300 homes. Episode 2 of the 10-part series slipped to an 11.7.
The vast majority of the Chicago homes watching "Last Dance," did so on ESPN (household ratings of 11.2 and 10.4) rather than the sanitized ESPN2 presentation (1.4 and 1.3).
National ratings were not yet available.
Regardless of whether those numbers match the expectations of local sports fans who craved shared experience in the absence of sports, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, "The Last Dance" blew away rival Sunday night programming in the Chicago area.
Two runners-up CBS mainstay "60 Minutes" (7.9) and ABC's "America's Funniest Home Videos" (4.7) did not run against the Jordan documentary. CBS' "NCIS: Los Angeles" and "NCIS: New Orleans" averaged a 4.7 and 3.9, respectively, while ABC's "American Idol" averaged 3.5 here.
It's not known yet how many people recorded "Last Dance" or any of the other programs for viewing in the days to come.
"The Last Dance" numbers should be seen as solid, but they don't stack up against, say, interest in the Bears. Over last year's 8-8 season, Matt Nagy's squad averaged a 26.2 household rating, which was down 9% from the season before.
Even accounting for the more-splintered audience of 2020 vs. the late 1990s and the fact "The Last Dance" is running on cable rather than free over-the-air broadcast TV, peak Jordan in action blows away a look back at peak Jordan.
Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals _ in which the Bulls beat the Jazz with 5.2 seconds remaining for their sixth title and second three-peat _ averaged a 52.1 household rating in the Chicago market. That was a whopping 52.1 of all area homes tuned in to NBC-5.
The Bulls' Game 6 clincher against the Jazz a year earlier for the '97 NBA championship averaged a 53.1 household rating in the market, more than four times as large as the ratings for the first two hours of "The Last Dance."
"The Last Dance" is scheduled to resume Sunday with Episodes 3 and 4, running weekly through May 17.
