ABC Celebrates Holidays With Easy Victory

With most shows in reruns for the travel-heavy period between Christmas and New Year’s, ABC unwrapped an easy ratings victory courtesy of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and the season’s last “Monday Night Football” game, based on viewing estimates issued Wednesday by Nielsen Media Research.

ABC also remained the top choice to ring in the New Year with the prime-time portion of its latest “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” special, after the network dominated the ratings a year ago with its new-millennium coverage.

ABC scattered reruns of “Whose Line” across the week, and though ratings for the improv show hosted by Drew Carey weren’t especially high, those numbers generally improved on the network’s standard results in those low-rated time slots.

In what amounts to a bookkeeping maneuver, several regular series were labeled “specials” last week, allowing the network to exclude those ratings from the program’s average this season. As it stands 13 weeks into the current TV campaign, “ER” continues as prime time’s top-rated series, while “Everybody Loves Raymond” has slipped past “Friends” as TV’s most-watched comedy. They are followed by the four editions of “Millionaire,” which are averaging 19.7 million viewers--formidable numbers, but still about 30% below the program’s viewing levels last season.

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Network Averages

Here is the number of viewers that each network averaged per hour of prime time, for last week and for the season.

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Last Season week to date ABC 11.74 million 13.04 CBS 9.40 11.84 NBC 8.87 12.12 FOX 8.57 9.85 UPN 3.12 4.09 WB 2.82 4.06

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Southland Viewing

Here are Nielsen’s Top 10 prime-time programs in the Los Angeles area during the same week. The rankings are based on the number of households watching.

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Sta- House- Program tion holds 1. Friends KNBC 610.379 2. Millionaire (Tue.) KABC 551,483 3. Millionaire (Wed.) KABC 546,128 4. The West Wing KNBC 508,649 5. Will & Grace KNBC 492,586 6. 60 Minutes KCBS 471,170 7. Law & Order KNBC 433,690 8. The Weber Show KNBC 422,982 9. ER KNBC 417,628 10. Millionaire (Thur.) KABC 417,628

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