​That loud whooshing sound you hear blowing across Los Angeles this week is the collective sigh of relief from the Big Four broadcasters now that they’ve seen audiences are still tuning in for their big fall premieres.

Not that anyone was expecting the total collapse of broadcast television this year. But in an age when younger viewers are increasingly adopting time-shifting viewing habits, the large audiences sampling the broadcast nets’ new priority series are seen as a welcome relief.

The big marketing campaigns leading up to the fall launches appear to have paid off in some instances, with even critical duds like NBC’s The Mysteries of Laura pulling solid Nielsen numbers out of the gate.

Each of the Big Four have something to be happy about after last week, with freshman series Scorpion and Madam Secretary (CBS), How to Get Away With Murder and Black-ish (ABC), The Mysteries of Laura (NBC), and Gotham (Fox) all delivering on the ratings goods.

Among the many takeaways: Variety’s Rick Kissell took a look at the first week numbers and pointed out that they reveal that America’s aging audiences are “skewing total-viewer results more than ever.”

He pointed out that mainstays like Law & Order: SVU and Grey’s Anatomy came back and posted multi-year high record viewer numbers, but their young adult demo numbers were down.

“Until the graying of the audience forces advertisers to embrace a wider demo spectrum,” Kissell wrote, total viewer numbers will not be a great way to judge a series’ ratings performance.

One of the other big questions looming over the industry is how much lift DVRs will be giving series this year.

With networks embracing live+3 and live+7 numbers, it’s clear that they are eager to capitalize on the popularity of time-shifting for their own gain.

Read More: Variety

Brief Take: Despite the doom and gloom predictions about the future of television, the first real week of the broadcast season showed that well-executed marketing campaigns can still drive tune-in to priority shows.

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