NCIS leads Dallas-Fort Worth ratings in calm before World Series storm

In Tuesday's local news derby results, WFAA8 nipped CBS11 in total viewers at 10 p.m.

CBS and ABC lapped up most of the ratings spoils Tuesday night before Wednesday's opening game of the World Series diverts almost all attention to Fox4 for the next two nights and over the weekend.

CBS' NCIS, still amazingly strong in its eighth season, led all prime-time programs with 505,576 D-FW viewers. ABC's Dancing with the Stars results show then took over the 8 p.m. hour with 415,542 viewers to hold off CBS' competing NCIS: Los Angeles (346,285 viewers). CBS' The Good Wife put the network back on top at 9 p.m. with 283,954 viewers, beating ABC's game Detroit 1-8-7 (228,548 viewers).

The results were mostly the same with advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-olds, although Fox's Rocky Horror-themed Glee moved into a first-place tie with NCIS.

ABC's No Ordinary Family, which the network recently picked up for a full season, had extraordinarily poor ratings in D-FW. It ran an out-of-the-money fourth in total viewers at 7 p.m. and drooped to fifth place at that hour (also well behind The CW's One Tree Hill) in the 18-to-49 demographic.

Also of note: reflecting a national trend, CBS' Late Show with David Letterman outdrew NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno in both ratings measurements. In fact, Leno ran fifth overall with 18-to-49-year-olds.

In Tuesday's local news derby results, WFAA8 nipped CBS11 in total viewers at 10 p.m. (214,697 to 207,771), but dipped to third with 25-to-54-year-olds behind both CBS11 and NBC5.

Fox4 again cleaned everyone's clock at 6 a.m., with struggling NBC5 climbing back into the runnerup spot in its ongoing battle for silver medals with WFAA8.

The 6 p.m. golds at 5 and 6 p.m. went to WFAA8. But the ABC station again struggled to maintain that pace with 25-to-54-year-olds, the main target audience for news programming on most stations. CBS11 finished first in that demographic at 5 p.m. before Fox4 topped the 6 p.m. Nielsens.