TV Ratings : All-Star Game Scores a Hit

Major league baseball’s annual All-Star Game didn’t perform as well as many of its predecessors but it still drew a larger audience than anything else on television last week. Ratings released Tuesday by the A. C. Nielsen Co. showed that the game was seen in about 16.2 million homes, compared to about 13.1 million for runner-up “Cheers.” Thanks to that and four other shows in the Top 10 (“Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown,” “Northern Exposure” and “60 Minutes”), CBS scored its fourth consecutive weekly win as the network attracted an average 19% of the prime-time audience. ABC and NBC each garnered 17%, and Fox netted 12%, with help from new episodes on Thursday of “Beverly Hills, 90210” (17th nationally; second in Los Angeles) and “The Simpsons” (24th nationally; fifth locally). The full list of ratings is on F10.

* A first-run showing of Spike Lee’s movie “Do the Right Thing” failed to generate much heat on CBS last Saturday. The film ranked 63rd among the week’s 90 prime-time network programs, with viewership in about 5.8 million homes--14% of the audience watching TV at the time.

Show Points Share 1. “All-Star Baseball Game” (CBS) 17.4 32 2. “Cheers” (NBC) 14.1 26 3. “Designing Women” (CBS) 14.0 25 4. “20/20” (ABC) 13.9 29 5. “Roseanne” (ABC) 13.7 24 * “Do the Right Thing” (CBS) 6.2 14