TV Ratings : Despite the NBA Ployoffs, NBC Comes in Third

Even with the NBA playoffs, NBC finished third last week in the prime-time ratings, the A.C. Nielsen Co. reported Tuesday. Two of the four basketball games finished among the week’s 10 highest-rated programs, but NBC was plagued by some poor-performing series, such as “Quantum Leap,” “Secret Service,” “The Powers That Be” and the 2-week-old “Black Tie Affair.”

The biggest basketball audience was on Wednesday for Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the New York Knicks and the Chicago Bulls, which was seen in about 14.5 million homes. That was less than the 16.8 million that tuned in the week’s highest-rated program, “60 Minutes,” but NBC said it was the second highest-rated non-NBA final game in history--and Game 6 on Friday was third. (No. 1 in that category is a Boston Celtic-New York Knicks game from 1973.)

ABC got a strong showing from its World Music Awards on Tuesday, but CBS attracted only 15% of the audience on Sunday for Broadway’s Tony Awards, which ran third in the 9-11 p.m. period behind ABC’s “Police Academy 6” and the debut of NBC’s “South Beach” series.