BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: ‘MISS USA’ BEATS ‘AMERIKA’

It was beauty versus bad times on TV Tuesday night, and when the national ratings became available Wednesday, they showed that a beauty pageant beat ABC’s grim “Amerika” in head-to-head competition.

According to CBS’ A.C. Nielsen Co. figures for 9-11 p.m. Tuesday, when the two shows were directly competing against each other, CBS’ Miss USA Pageant got a 22.7 rating, ABC’s “Amerika” a 17.7, and a two-hour “Remington Steele” episode on NBC a 15.5. Each rating point represents 874,000 homes.

(ABC, calculating things slightly differently, said “Amerika” actually had an 18 rating. A spokesman said the show really ended at 10:54 p.m., was followed by a brief business news report and that ABC’s figure was for “Amerika” only.)

In any event, the returns indicated that although viewers in 13 major cities preferred “Amerika” to the beauty contest by a narrow margin, it was the other way around--and by a large margin--elsewhere in the nation.

Earlier “overnight” ratings for the 13 cities--Los Angeles among them--showed Chapter 3 of ABC’s seven-part miniseries averaging a 29% share of the audience from 9-11 p.m., with CBS’ beauty show averaging a 28.5% share.

But those preliminary ratings showed a continued downward trend for ABC’s nearly 15-hour effort, which premiered on Sunday with a 42% share of audience in those 13 cities.

Nationally, 21.5 million viewers tuned into “Amerika” Sunday night, according to Nielsen figures. On Monday that figure dropped to 18.3 million; Tuesday night, 15.5 million watched the show depicting life in the United States 10 years after a bloodless takeover by the Soviet Union.

On Monday night, the 13-market figure dropped to 33% and descended again Tuesday night to 28.6% for the 2 1/2 hours that “Amerika” was on.

ABC, getting a half-hour jump on CBS’ beauty pageant, had begun the third night of its $41-million miniseries at 8:30 p.m. The overnight returns showed that the strategy worked in the 13 cities sampled and helped ABC win the night there, albeit by a narrow margin.

But on a national basis, according to the Nielsens, Tuesday was CBS’ night. That network, whose beauty show was preceded by a one-hour “Candid Camera” special, averaged a 20.1 rating and a 30% share of audience.

ABC, whose “Amerika” was preceded by “Who’s the Boss?” averaged an 18.4 rating and a 27% share of audience. NBC, offering a lineup of “Matlock” and “Remington Steele,” was a close third.