Bowl Games Lead ABC to One-Sided Weekly Win

College football kicked off the New Year on a winning note for ABC, as a trio of prime-time telecasts--including higher tune-in for the national championship game--paced the network to a lopsided victory, based on viewing estimates issued Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research.

The Orange Bowl, featuring Oklahoma vs. Florida State, drew slightly more viewers than the 2000 title contest, easily surpassing ratings for any “Monday Night Football” game this season.

CBS, meanwhile, opened the televised award-show season with the People’s Choice Awards. Hosted by Kevin James, the ceremony proved 5% less popular than a year ago and fell 25% versus 1999, before “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” took over ABC’s 9 p.m. Sunday slot.

ABC relocated an edition of “Millionaire” to Friday, attracting the network’s biggest audience for a regularly scheduled program that night in nearly four years; still, having the show lead into “Two Guys and a Girl” and “Norm” didn’t do much for those ABC sitcoms, which finished well behind “CSI” and “Dateline NBC” in their hour.

With Fox’s Sunday afternoon NFL playoff coverage spilling into prime time on the East Coast, “The Simpsons” and “Malcolm in the Middle” scored their highest ratings in nearly a year. NBC’s “ER” also posted its second-biggest numbers this season.

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 16.83 million 13.32 NBC 11.99 12.11 CBS 11.44 11.81 FOX 9.91 9.86 UPN 3.56 4.06 WB 3.39 4.01

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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 926,277 2. ER KNBC 920,922 3. 60 Minutes KCBS 722,817 4. Will & Grace KNBC 706,754 5. Just Shoot Me KNBC 647,858 6. Millionaire (Sun.) KABC 637,150 7. The Practice KABC 583,608 8. Touched by an Angel KCBS 572,899 9. Millionaire (Fri.) KABC 540,774 The Weber Show KNBC 540,774

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