CBS Just Scored 6.6 Million Viewers With the 5-Year-Old Premiere Episode of 'Yellowstone'

The prolonged WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have begun to force the broadcast networks into some serious decision-making.

On Monday, for example, Disney-ABC announced that 10 additional Monday Night Football games, originally set for exclusive cablecasting on ESPN, will now be shared with ABC.

For its part, Paramount Global only has Sunday afternoon NFL access for CBS. But the conglomerate does have the untapped, seemingly limitless potential of producer Taylor Sheridan to tap into.

On Sunday, the premiere episode of Sheridan's seminal series, Yellowstone -- which originally debuted on the Paramount Network back on June 20, 2018 -- generated 6.6 million viewers for CBS.

The 8 p.m. installment benefited from a particularly strong lead-in, with a 60 Minutes episode featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy generating 11.4 million viewers.

But still ... consider that brand new episodes of CBS' time-slot incumbent, The Equalizer, generated 6.47 million viewers last season.

The network will soon up the Yellowstone burn rate, with plans to air two episodes  of the show each Sunday starting this week. But with 46 more episodes of Yellowstone in the can, CBS should be able to keep this up through the 2023-24 TV season, should labor unrest persist.

Yellowstone debuted to a viewer average of just 2.8 million watchers across Paramount Plus and various other Paramount cable networks back in 2018. Since that time, plenty of viewers have caught up via binging on Peacock, which ended up with exclusive streaming rights.

But there are clearly plenty of viewers who still haven't seen the remarkable show, evidenced by CBS' solid Sunday-night performance.

Meanwhile, Sheridan's various Yellowstone spinoffs --1883 and 1923 -- are also available for broadcast runs, as are the prolific creator's non-Yellowstone efforts for Paramount (Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King and the Lioness among them).

During Paramount's second quarter earnings call in August, Sheridan's name came up three times, according to our check of the transcript.

It somehow doesn't seem like enough.