Criminal Minds Nabs Lucrative Post-Super Bowl Slot

NEW YORK, December 5: CBS has announced that Criminal
Minds will air in the much-coveted
post-Super Bowl slot on Sunday, February 4.

This year, the annual football event on ABC propelled Grey’s
Anatomy, broadcast after a post-game wrap-up, to record ratings of 38.1
million viewers. Since 1991, only two post-Super Bowl programs have drawn a
bigger audience—CBS’s Survivor
in 2001 and NBC’s Friends in
1996. This year, the game itself was watched by a whopping 90.7 million, the
event’s largest audience since 1996, when it was watched by an average of 94.1
million viewers.

Criminal Minds
receives the post-Super Bowl position after a successful second season that has
seen it eclipse the ratings of ABC’s Lost, also produced by Touchstone Television and distributed worldwide by
Buena Vista International Television. The show is ranked as number seven among
all prime-time programs, with an average viewership of 16.8 million, a 25
percent gain on its season one performance.

"In just a couple of months, Criminal Minds has gone from our unsung hero to a Top 10
series," said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment.
"Millions of viewers are discovering it every week and obviously they like
what they see. This is an outstanding opportunity to expose a series that is
young in its life cycle and on the rise to an enormous universe of potential
new viewers."