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Broadcast television spent another season being quietly written off, and another season proving the obituaries were being filed a little too early. Nielsen's final multiplatform ranker for the 2025-26 season, published by The Hollywood Reporter, covers the full Sept. 14 to May 24 run and folds 35 days of streaming into the linear totals, which is where network shows have done most of the work for a while now. Stranger Things, unsurprisingly, takes the overall crown with 32.9 million viewers for its last batch of episodes, though the more revealing numbers sit a little further down the chart.
Among series that originate on broadcast networks, and leaving live sports out of it, the top five is almost entirely a CBS list. Marshals leads the pack with 19.3 million viewers over 35 days, with Tracker, Matlock, and Sheriff Country filling out the rest. Only one show interrupts the run, and it belongs to ABC, which has spent two years building its scripted slate around a single mother with a 160 IQ and a fondness for animal print.
High Potential finished third among broadcast series with 16 million viewers across 35 days, a total unchanged since the April accounting because the Kaitlin Olson procedural had already wrapped its second season on April 7. That it held position while the CBS shows around it slipped slightly says something about how the audience interacts with it. Roughly half of the show's viewing comes from Hulu and Disney+ rather than the Tuesday night broadcast, which is why a series with modest same-day ratings keeps ending up in company like this.
The critical numbers have kept pace with the viewing ones, too. Season 2 currently holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit from a small pool of six reviews, against the 96% Season 1 earned from 25. In the 18-49 demographic that still sets ad rates, High Potential led every ABC entertainment series on the schedule, and it did so from the 10PM slot, which is not where networks usually expect to find their strongest young audience. We said early on that the appeal came down to Olson rather than the case-of-the-week structure, and the second season leaned into that by taking Morgan somewhere darker than the first.
What the ranking cannot smooth over is the gap that's coming next. ABC renewed the show for a third season in March, weeks ahead of the divisive finale, then moved it off the fall schedule entirely in favor of an uninterrupted midseason run in 2027, with a reduced episode count. Showrunner Todd Harthan has also departed, and a replacement has not been named. For a series whose whole trick has been compounding word of mouth over 35-day windows, an 11-month absence is a genuine test of how much of that audience was watching Olson and how much was watching whatever ABC put on at 10PM.
