Tuesday, May 13, 2008

American Gladiators and House both bomb with DFW viewers

By Ed Bark of UncleBarky.com

NBC's two-hour return of American Gladiators bombed Monday night. But so -- surprisingly -- did a new episode of Fox's House.

Gladiators averaged just 77,939 D-FW homes in running a distant fourth from 8 to 10 p.m. It managed a third-place finish among advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-olds, with Fox's duo of Bones and House falling far out of the money into fourth place. Nationally, though, both Fox dramas did fine.

ABC's Dancing with the Stars performance show as usual controlled Monday's 7 to 8:30 p.m. slot, drawing 258,174 D-FW homes and also edging CBS' comedy lineup in the 18-to-49 demo. But CBS' CSI: Miami had the night's biggest haul with 289,836 total homes.

Over on the Versus cable network, the Dallas Stars' dispiriting home loss to Detroit averaged 56,019 homes, peaking at 77,939 to match Gladiators' overall audience for two 15-minute intervals.

In the local news derby, CBS11 capitalized in a big way on the CSI: Miami lead-in. Its 253,302 total homes bested the usual frontrunning WFAA8 (241,124 homes) and likely drove a stake through NBC5's chances to overtake CBS11 for the May sweeps runnerup spot. The Peacock drew just 126,651 homes Monday.

CBS11 also won at 10 p.m. among 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming. NBC5 again ran far back in third, but still likely has enough gas to end up second for the sweeps in that key demo.

WFAA8 comfortably topped the topsy turvy 6 a.m. Nielsens in both ratings measurements after running well back in third place on Friday. The Peacock, a two-time winner on Friday, fell back to third behind runnerup Fox4. Any of the three stations could still win at this hour, although WFAA8 has the pole position.

WFAA8's newscasts ran the table at 5 and 6 p.m., where the station remains ahead of the pack.

Pegasus News content partner - UncleBarky.com

Check out Uncle Barky's blog for the latest installment in his "A night in the lives of D-FW's late night newscasts" series.

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