Summer’s a season of highs and lows for TV. Broadcast networks tend to have a hard time staying in the mix when its regular dramas and comedies go off the air to be replaced by lower-cost reality or one-off summer series, while cable networks and streaming services often surprise by serving up a hit out of nowhere.

This summer has been especially challenging due to several huge live events: the Democratic and Republican political conventions and the Summer Olympics in Rio. Still, some networks have managed to work well within that environment while others have struggled.

The broadcast networks — and particularly ABC and NBC — have managed to fare well this summer with its unscripted shows, reports The Hollywood Reporter, who broke out who it thought was winning and losing this summer.

ABC scored with its Sunday night line-up of revamped game shows, starting with $100,000 Pyramid, hosted by the can-do-no-wrong Michael Strahan; moving to Match Game, hosted by Alec Baldwin, and finishing up with Celebrity Family Feud starring Steve Harvey. To be fair, ABC got the idea when Celebrity Family Feud was a huge break-out hit last summer, but it’s rare that one show works and the network manages to create a line-up around that show. All three shows have been renewed.

NBC has been summer’s top network for years with America’s Got Talent and that hasn’t changed. Moreover, NBC is up 11% this summer compared to last even without sports or news, and before the Olympics or pre-season football kicked in. ABC and CBS also boast two summer stalwarts in The Bachelorette and Big Brother, the latter of which will air on CBS All Access this fall.

Meanwhile, summer scripted series on broadcast networks are doing much less well, notes THR. CBS’ BrainDead is averaging a 0.4 rating among adults 18-49 in live-plus-three-day viewing, while American Gothic is averaging a 0.7. Fox’s Matt Dillon-less Wayward Pines returned down nearly 50% for season two, and overall Fox is down 20% summer to summer, the most of any broadcast net.

Neither has cable been as buzzy this summer as last with two big breakouts from last year — USA’s Mr. Robot and Lifetime’s UNReal — both generating lower ratings and less chatter. THR notes that OWN’s prestige drama, Greenleaf, featuring Oprah Winfrey herself, is averaging 3 million viewers in first-run viewing, and that’s a big number when it comes to basic cable. In a similar camp are AMC’s Preacher with 3.3 million viewers, Starz’ Power with 2.9 million and HBO’s Ballers at 2.4 million.

Back on the buzz scale, a few of summer’s buzziest shows are Netflix’s Stranger Things and The Get Down and HBO’s The Night Of. How Stranger Things and The Get Down are really doing we have no idea due to Netflix’s continued policy of not releasing ratings, much to the frustration of its competitors.

READ MORE: The Hollywood Reporter

[Image of Stranger Things courtesy of Netflix]

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