TV Ratings : ’60 Minutes’ Wallops ‘Batman’

Fox’s new animated adventures of “Batman” have been tearing up the children’s ratings this season, but the magic fizzled when the show hit prime time last Sunday. The cartoon drew only 8% of the available audience at 7 p.m. while the numbers for “60 Minutes” soared, making the CBS newsmagazine the top-rated show of the week. Figures released Tuesday by the A.C. Nielsen Co. showed CBS winning the week with a prime-time average of 13, compared to 12.6 for ABC, 10.6 for NBC and 8.2 for Fox.

* Tom Arnold’s new series took a tumble in its second outing. The ABC show ranked No. 2 in its first week out, but last week it was No. 18. In the program’s defense, it’s true that “Roseanne,” which precedes it in the Tuesday lineup, was a rerun and didn’t draw as big an audience as a first-run episode had the week before. On the other hand, it’s also true that 30% of the people who watched “The Jackie Thomas Show” the first time weren’t there for the second. Arnold did manage, however, to retain 86% of his wife’s audience.

TV Ratings

Points Share 1. “60 Minutes” (CBS) 24.7 40 2. “Murder, She Wrote” (CBS) 19.2 29 3. “Roseanne” (ABC) 17.1 26 4. “A Killer Among Friends” (CBS) 16.7 27 5. “Home Improvement” (ABC) 16.4 24 “Murphy Brown” (CBS) 16.4 24 * “The Jackie Thomas Show” (ABC) 14.7 23

Complete list, F12 (Each rating point represents 931,000 homes.

Share is the percentage of viewing audience.)