Diane Sawyer’s Bruce Jenner Interview Scores Huge Ratings for ABC

ABC’s two-hour special edition of 20/20 featuring Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bruce Jenner scored big numbers for ABC. Bruce Jenner: The Interview averaged 16.9 million viewers and a 5.2 rating among adults 18-49.

That’s around 10 million more viewers than usually watch ABC on a Friday night. The special also scored high marks with adults 25-54 (6.4 rating) and adults 18-34 (4.2 rating).

Bruce Jenner: The Interview, which earned high praise from critics, was TV’s biggest Friday non-sports broadcast since 2003 in viewers and young adults, according to ABC. It was also the top-rated broadcast in adults 25-54 since 2005.

This marked 20/20’s top ratings on a Friday with viewers, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 in 15 years, since March 17, 2000 (featuring an interview with JonBenet Ramsey’s parents).

The interview did particularly well with women 25-54, where it posted an 8.6 rating — dwarfing anything else on the broadcast networks Friday night.

As a result, ABC easily won the night among adults 18-49 with a 4.0 rating — beating the combined averages of CBS (1.1), NBC (0.9), Fox (0.9) and The CW (0.4).

In social media, ABC says Bruce Jenner: The Interview drew 972,000 tweets from 403,000 unique users, making it “the most social Friday telecast of all time excluding sporting events.”

TV Tattle has a roundup of the interview’s highlights. “For all intents and purposes, I am a woman,” the Olympian said at the beginning of Diane Sawyer’s two-hour special that announced Jenner is transgender. Jenner told Sawyer that “this is not a publicity stunt” and confirmed that E! will document Jenner’s transition through eight hour-long episodes.