TV Ratings: ‘Young Sheldon’ Series Finale Scores Four-Year High

The final episodes of young sheldon  drew a big crowd for CBS.

The comedy ended its seven-season run Thursday night with 9.32 million viewers for its series finale, according to final same-day ratings from Nielsen (which don’t include streaming). That’s the biggest same-day audience for the show in four years — since its third season finale on April 30, 2020.

Young Sheldon ended with a pair of episodes, and the first drew almost as many viewers (9.15 million) at 8 p.m. ET/PT as the 8:30 p.m. finale. The two episodes rank second and third in same-day viewers among all scripted series this season, behind only the post-Super Bowl premiere of Tracker. (Both episodes adjusted up from Nielsen’s preliminary figures, which had them at 8.82 million viewers for the 8 p.m. installment and 8.95 million for the finale.)

Sheldon also recorded its two best showings of the season among adults 18-49, scoring a 0.71 rating (937,000 viewers in the demographic) for its first episode and a 0.76 (about 1.01 million viewers) for the finale.

Young Sheldon came into Thursday averaging 7.03 million same-day viewers this season, making it the most-watched network comedy for the fifth straight season. Thursday’s episodes finished 30 percent and 32 percent above the same-day average.

CBS has an ongoing, 19-year run of having the most-watched comedy of the season on its airwaves. The streak began with the final season of Everybody Loves Raymond in 2004-05 and continued with Two and a Half Men and Young Sheldon’s predecessor, The Big Bang Theory. The latter three are all executive produced by Chuck Lorre.