Anderson Cooper's NYE Ratings Hit High Without Kathy Griffin
Pal Andy Cohen proved to a be a strong replacement, as the CNN telecast climbed 10 percent from the previous year for an average 3.3 million viewers.
Anderson Cooper's latest New Year's Eve partner brought new ratings highs.
The annual CNN telecast, which swapped Kathy Griffin for Andy Cohen after the former's controversial photo shoot with a severed facsimile of President Donald Trump's head, climbed 10 percent from the previous year for an average 3.3 million viewers.
That number made the telecast the most-watched in all of cable and bodes well for Cohen doing a repeat. (He and Cooper, famous friends, also have a long-running speaking tour called AC2.) Griffin had previously played comic relief to the strait-laced Cooper from 2011-2016.
Of course, Cooper's haul was just a drop in TV's very large New Year's Eve bucket. The night's most-watched broadcast, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest, averaged a stunning 25.6 million viewers for the hour surrounding the ball drop — a 27-year high for the ABC franchise.
