Behind the Scenes Buzz with Nielsen’s Most Watched Shows

MOST WATCHED SHOWS THIS YEAR: Nielsen released its 2020 Top 10 list of the most-watched telecasts and series. For cable, Paramount Network‘s Yellowstone topped the list. The Top 10 list of most watched telecasts (in Live+7) is dominated by football, with only Fox‘s The Masked Singer and ABC‘s The Oscars from entertainment programming making the cut, Deadline reports. Non-sport series were led by CBS’ NCIS, FBI and Blue Bloods. Also of note, via Deadline: Q2 2020 live and time-shifted TV consumption among people 18 and older increased by an average of 4 minutes per day (to 4 hours: 8 minutes) from the prior year. Overall, in the second quarter of this year, consumers 18 and older spent just shy of 6 hours each day with video, an increase of 35 minutes from the prior-year period.

DARK KNIGHT, SHREK, GREASE AMONG THOSE ADDED TO NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY: The Dark Knight, Shrek, Grease, The Blues Brothers, Lillies of the Field, The Hurt Locker, A Clockwork Orange, The Joy Luck Club and the Man With the Golden Arm are among this year year’s additions to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. “This is not only a great honor for all of us who worked on The Dark Knight, this is also a tribute to all of the amazing artists and writers who have worked on the great mythology of Batman over the decades,” said Christopher Nolan.

HASBRO UNVEILS STAR WARS TOYS: Four new items tied to the second season of Disney+‘s The Mandalorian debuted Monday. The four figures, Tusken Raider, Shoretrooper, Imperial Hovertank Driver and Imperial Death Trooper, are 6″ high and cost $19.99.

THE RESIDENT TO TAKE PLACE POST-PANDEMIC: Unlike most other medical dramas on TV, Fox‘s The Resident will return in January in a post-COVID, post-vaccine world. “You can’t ignore COVID, and nor did we want to. We wanted to tell the story of covid, we wanted to honor all the frontline medical workers – of whom a bunch are our writing staff,” Andrew Chapman, who started with The Resident in season one and was recently elevated to co-showrunner, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We thought that by the time we got on air – January, February, March of 2021 – not just the public but we as staff writers were going to be so underwater with COVID and COVID stories, and so sick of the pandemic and being locked down and the tragedy of it. We were trying to figure out a way that we can both honor the frontline workers and tell a story that’s compelling, so we made a sort of educated guess.”