Canadians overwhelmingly chose to ring in the new year with the Canadian Junior men’s hockey team.
TSN scored a whopping 3,271,000 viewers with their broadcast of the Canada/USA New Year’s Eve nail biter, double the audience the show pulled last year on the pre-PPM scale (1,673,000).
The international hockey summit swamped everything else on the tube Dec. 31 according to overnight estimates at BBM Canada.
CBC’s traditional lineup of New Year’s Eve comedies took a hockey hit, with Air Farce averaging 948,000 at 8 and Ron James pulling another 828,000.
The Air Farce tally was similar to other million-plus or -minus numbers the troupe delivered on New Year’s Eve’s past (except for last year when the final series sign off boosted ratings to over 1.5 million). The midnight Air Farce repeat drew 392,000, similar to last year, with the special NYE edition of The Hour pulling 268,000.
Add the Jan. 1 Air Farce repeat (484,000) to the total tally and the troupe scored 1,824,000 viewers for the NYE special.
CTV and Global took the night off with a So You Think You Can Dance Canada finale rerun (218,000) and the movie Aftermath (194,000). City scored 733,000 for their annual New Year’s Eve bash from 10-to-midnight, with Global collecting 655,000 for their Niagara Falls NYE special at 11:35. Two CTV “Peak Season” Olympic corporate flag wavers finished well out of the medals with 184,000 and 85,000 respectively.
In Toronto, Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve beat just about everything on Canadian stations at midnight, drawing 222,000 on Buffalo ABC affiliate WKBW. That topped the 188,000 on Global and 117,000 watching Air Farce on CBC at that hour in Toronto; only City’s NTE bash (484,000) was a bigger year ender in T.O.
Family Channel cracked the night’s Top 10 national and hit a high of 664,000 at 5:30 p.m. with their Suite Life marathon, which scored eight consecutive half hours over 400,000.
Bragging rights, specialty or broadcast, still belonged to TSN, which rang down a spectacular 2009 with 845,000 catching the junior hockey pre-show and an additional 756,000 viewers for a late Sportscentre edition, with 446,000 of those in the 25-54-year-old range.
Canada seeks its sixth straight World Junior Hockey Gold Medal Tuesday night at 8 p.m. vs. the United States on TSN.
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