History's band of Ice Road Truckers continued their drive with viewers, grabbing 3 million watchers for its third-season debut.
The May 31 premiere in the 9 p.m. hour also scored well with key demos, averaging 1.9 million adults 25 to 54 and 1.7 million persons 18 to 49, according to Nielsen Media Research data. Those demos deliveries exceeded the series' season-two averages by 19% and 13%, respectively.
Ice Road Truckers served as a lead-in to Mark Burnett's Expedition Africa, a modern-day reality re-creation of the Henry Morton Stanley's 19th century trek to find Dr. David Livingstone, which averaged 1.3 million viewers, including 723,000 and 640,000 adults 25 to 54 and 18 to 49, respectively. Those performances were up 19% and 15% above History's primetime average among those groups.
All told, History will chronicle a group of four explorers retracing Stanley's steps from Zanzibar to Tanzania over eight one-hour installments.
