NEW YORK — In what was otherwise a rough two weeks in Tokyo for NBC, television viewers responded — at least slightly — to the U.S. Olympic team’s strong performance in the second half of the Games.

NBC’s prime-time broadcast viewership for the second week was down 46% compared to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016, the Nielsen company said. In the first week, NBC was down 52% compared to Rio.

Last Tuesday, the 14.3 million people who watched the Games on NBC was actually up from the 14 million that had watched a week earlier from Tokyo. Generally, viewership goes down in the second week of the Olympics as viewers begin to tire of the nightly competition.