A night of big shifts in cable’s typical lineup brought a win Monday for Fox News Channel, which topped primetime among both adults 25-54 and total viewers. Most importantly, Tucker Carlson shifted into ousted Bill O’Reilly’s 8 o’clock hour as the night’s dominant telecast.
The first official night without The O’Reilly Factor saw the 8 p.m. telecast of Tucker Carlson Tonight average 3.2 million viewers and 636,000 adults 25-54, per early returns from Nielsen Media. Though it will be some time before there’s a sense of how Carlson’s numbers compare to O’Reilly’s, he at least successfully kept the hour as cable news’ biggest during his premiere telecast. O’Reilly’s final Monday on the air, his penultimate Fox News telecast on April 10, averaged 3.7 million viewers and 635,000 adults 25-54 — so while Carlson may not have pulled the same audience, he was dead even in the demo.
