Crowning tears: Miss Teen USA skids

NBC beauty pageant pulls a 3.8 in households

By Toni Fitzgerald
Aug 16, 2006

It has not been a great summer for specials on any network. ABC’s country music fest earlier this summer did poorly, as have special episodes of cable shows from their sister networks aired by NBC and Fox. A special inviting viewers to vote on "Big Brother's" then-upcoming all-star edition was disappointing.

Last night the trend continued with NBC’s “Miss Teen USA,” which may have set a record for the lowest household rating in the pageant’s 23 years on television.

“Teen” averaged a 3.8 overnight household rating, down 3 percent from last year’s record-low-tying 3.9 for the pageant, which aired on a Friday.

Its 1.7 average in adults 18-49 was down 23 percent from last year’s 2.2, and it managed just 5.6 million total viewers. If that number holds when final ratings are released later today, it will rank only ahead of the 2004 “Teen” pageant, which averaged 5.34 million for NBC.

“Teen” once had very healthy ratings. At its peak, the pageant averaged 22 million viewers on CBS in 1988, and even as recently as 1999, it averaged more than 10 million. But disinterest in beauty pageants has grown over the past decade, and ratings for summer broadcast programming in general have declined as well.

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