I’m looking at the TV ratings for Thursday, when animated Peanuts specials were on two networks at the same time (the A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving/The Mayflower Voyages hour running 8-9 on ABC, while Fox ran Happiness is a Warm Blanket 8:30-9:30). None of them won their time slot. The ABC slot averaged 5.8 million viewers; the first half hour of Warm Blanket got 5.3 million, the second got 4 million.

But there’s some interesting things that appear looking at the numbers. While I don’t have the numerical split to be certain, viewership on ABC almost certainly dropped for the second half hour; that’s true of any show, and likely to be more true when switching from a “classic” to something watchable but less esteemed. If so, it’s likely that the first half of Warm Blanket beat The Mayflower Voyages. The Fox airing’s numbers are respectable, although they do drop from their lead in the new Ice Age special. But if you consider just the 8:30 to 9 half hour, the combined viewership for Peanuts wins that slot, even if 2/3s of the people who watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving decided to skip The Mayflower Voyages (and the drop-off was almost certainly less than that.)

If we count the hour averages as applying to the whole hour, then out of 23.34 million households viewing network TV during 8:30-9, 11.08 were viewing Peanuts. That’s 47%. That ain’t bad at all.

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