Yellowstone actually had 11.4 million viewers for Sunday's Season 4 premiere -- proof that the traditional TV model isn't dead

Vulture

"When I saw a tweet Monday night reporting that season four of Yellowstone had opened to just north of 8 million viewers, my first thought was, Ah, the folks at Paramount Network PR did a good job hyping the Nielsen numbers," says Josef Adalian. "After all, the season three finale had notched 5.2 million viewers back in August 2020, and in this era of perpetual ratings decline — particularly in cable — such enormous year-to-year gains simply don’t happen anymore. Networks these days need to go to great lengths to spin their incredibly shrinking audiences, so I was pretty sure some trickery was involved. As it turns out, not only was the reported figure legit, it actually undersold the show’s performance. If you include simulcasts of the premiere on three other ViacomCBS networks (TV Land, CMT, and Pop), Yellowstone’s Sunday audience was just shy of 10 million viewers. And if you throw in a few encores later in the evening on Paramount, it grows to 11.4 million viewers. These are stunning numbers, the best we’ve seen for any cable show since 2018 vintage The Walking Dead and a bigger same-day audience than just about every entertainment series on TV this year. But what makes them even more impressive is that they haven’t been padded by viewers from ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ or any other subscription streaming service because, just like FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story, the only way to legally watch new episodes of Yellowstone as they debut is by having a cable subscription (including virtual cable platforms such as Hulu with Live TV) or purchasing them on iTunes and other digital stores. Because of a deal with Peacock announced early last year, there is no next-day streaming of Yellowstone outside of the aforementioned cable services. Unless you buy the show, it’s the bundle or bust. That Yellowstone is able to aggregate such a huge audience in one night without the benefit of an SVOD component underscores once again why it is a mistake to totally write off traditional TV, even as streaming is ascendant."