Top 30 TV Shows: November 5 - 11

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BBM released its latest weekly list of Top 30 TV programs watched by Canadians. Here are their rankings for the period of November 5 to 11:

Notes: The “+/-” is calculated as the difference in the Average Minute Audience between current week and the previous week. The “% ∆” is calculated as the percentage change in the Average Minute Audience between the two weeks. The “Prev” category denotes the ranking of the program from the previous week. A (-) denotes the program not appearing in the previous week's Top 30 programs.

Notes from BBM Canada: "This chart shows the Top 30 TV programs for all national networks and Canadian English specialty networks for the week indicated. Programs are ranked based on their AMA...The chart also indicates the broadcast outlet on which the program aired and the program’s start and end time (shown in Eastern Time)." Demographic: All Persons 2+.

A few things of interest:

• The Mentalist has experienced a boost in viewership by almost 40% from the previous week and has been seen by 1.9M viewers, which is its largest audience yet during this fall season. Since the Mentalist aired on Remembrance Day at 10 pm, federal workers received the day off the following day and some were were likely awake after 10 pm that night to watch the show. This is only one explanation and certainly isn't the only explanation for this enormous boost in viewers.

• Criminal Minds was moved back to Tuesday at 10 pm from Wednesday at 9 pm causing the show to lose roughly 20% of its audience. 

• The week after Hurricane Sandy, CTV National News and Global National no longer appear in the Top 30. CTV National News viewership dropped below 1.15M and presumably, Global National viewers diminished too. During Hurricane Sandy, Global National was watched by 1.1M people, while CTV National News was viewed by 1.24M people. 

• The Edmonton-Toronto CFL semi-finals game was watched by 1.37 million viewers, according to BBM. Earlier this week, TSN released the overnight ratings:

“Overnight data from BBM Canada confirms that the Western Semifinal, featuring Saskatchewan @ Calgary in a game punctuated by a wild finish, attracted an average audience of 1.6 million viewers on TSN.
... 
Earlier in the afternoon, the Eastern Semifinal with Edmonton @ Toronto was watched by an average audience of 1.1 million viewers on TSN.”

We don't expect the overnights and the finalized ratings to match since they are simply estimates. However, what is peculiar when comparing figures is that the late afternoon game between Calgary and Saskatchewan, which had a higher a overnight rating, didn't beat the Edmonton-Toronto game because...it was no where to be found in the Top 30.

The overnight ratings seem plausible for Sunday afternoon football games shown on cable, but there is a difference of 200 000 people for the EDM-TOR game between the overnights and the final ones and a difference of, at least, 450 000 for the CGY-SASK game. (Picked 450 000 since the 30th most popular show, Person of Interest, was seen by 1.15 million people, which would be the maximum number of viewers for the CGY-SASK game. Remember, the overnight was 1.6 million. Still following?) If there is a difference of 450 000 between the overnight and final ratings, this may suggest that the overnight rating is an awful estimate in this case. The other explanation, which would seem more reasonable, is that there was some sort of human error during the data crunching process at BBM.