The 59th season premiere of 60 Minutes was heavily scrutinized — but not as heavily watched as last year’s debut.
The Sept. 13 episode of 60 Minutes delivered 7.94 million on-air viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s down about 21 percent from the show’s premiere last year, which had 10.03 million viewers on Sept. 28, 2025.
Sunday’s show was also the first since CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss overhauled the long-running newsmagazine, letting several veteran correspondents and producers go and bringing on a new executive producer in Nick Bilton and several new correspondents and contributors. (Only one of the new on-air staffers, former New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, saw any significant screen time Sunday.)
On the plus side, CBS News says video views on 60 Minutes social platforms (not including YouTube) recorded 116.7 million views, tripling the amount for last year’s premiere. Watch time on YouTube, which recently changed what it counts as a view, more than doubled.
Ratings for 60 Minutes, particularly in the fall, tend to fluctuate based on whether the show has an NFL lead-in across most of the country. Sunday’s show did, but CBS’ late afternoon football audience was also significantly smaller than a year ago: 18.6 million viewers, which was off by about 22 percent from the lead-in game to 60 Minutes‘ 2025 premiere. That matchup, which came in week four of the NFL season, had 23.77 million viewers.
The late afternoon game on CBS (Packers-Vikings for most of the country) was also down from last year’s week one (23.89 million viewers), but there are extenuating circumstances here as well: For the first time since 2023, the NFL scheduled opening Sunday doubleheaders on both CBS and Fox rather than just one network. So while the total audience watching football heading into primetime was bigger than last year, it was split between the two networks. Fox’s NFL numbers for Sunday weren’t immediately available.
Read the full article here
