Without Baseball, Fox Sinks in Ratings

November 06, 2007 by The Associated Press | Staff

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By FRAZIER MOORE
AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- With no baseball in the lineup, Fox sunk from first to fourth in the ratings.

The week before, four World Series games had helped that network to a winning average of 13.78 million viewers. But its average viewership dropped to 7.01 million last week. After two weeks at the top, Fox was back where it started the fall season.

As the new series overall continued getting more yawns than viewers, ABC could claim the four most-watched in the freshman class: "Samantha Who?" (in 14th place, though benefiting from its lead-in, the Monday edition of "Dancing with the Stars"), "Private Practice (ranked 25th), "Women's Murder Club" (35th), and "Pushing Daisies" (in 43rd place, though its audience is steadily eroding).

CBS' new season of "Amazing Race" started strong, in 17th place. But premiering for its sophomore season, ABC's "Men in Trees" was shrublike, ranking 74th.

NBC's dueling illusionists on "Phenomenon" made more viewers disappear in its second week, as this reality series slipped to 69th place from its premiere-week 45th.

For the week in prime time, CBS led with an average 12.33 million viewers (7.8 household rating, 13 share), followed by ABC with 11.33 million (7.4 rating, 12 share) and NBC with 7.98 million (5.0 rating, 8 share). Fox with its 7.01 million (4.3 rating, 7 share) was followed by the CW with 2.64 million (1.7 rating, 3 share), while My Network TV had 1.04 million (0.7 rating, 1 share) and ION Television 610,000 (0.4 rating, 1 share).

Among the Spanish-language networks last week, Univision averaged 3.68 million viewers (1.9 rating, 3 share), followed by Telemundo with 950,000 viewers (0.5 rating, 1 share), TeleFutura 600,000 with viewers (0.3 rating, 1 share) and Azteca 180,000 viewers (0.1 rating, 0 share).

In the evening news race, ABC held the lead with 8.57 million viewers (6.0 rating, 12 share), followed by NBC's "Nightly News" with 8.26 million (5.7 rating, 12 share). "CBS Evening News" averaged 6.22 million (4.4 rating, 9 share).

A ratings point represents 1,130,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 112.8 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Oct. 29-Nov. 4, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "Dancing with the Stars" (Monday), ABC, 21.43 million; "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 19.31 million; "60 Minutes," CBS, 19.24 million; "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 19.06 million; "Dancing with the Stars" (Tuesday), ABC, 18.86 million; "Desperate Housewives," ABC, 18.58 million; "House," Fox, 17.30 million; NFL Football: Dallas Cowboys at Philadelphia Eagles, NBC, 16.45 million; "NCIS," CBS, 16.33 million; "Criminal Minds," CBS, 14.94 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is a division of CBS Corp. Fox is a unit of News Corp. NBC is owned by General Electric Co. Telemundo is owned by General Electric. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks.

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