Super Bowl Party Helps CBS to Rare Weekly Win

The Super Bowl and “Survivor” provided the finishing touches to a weekend orgy of football-related programming on CBS, which scored its first weekly prime-time victory since early December and only its second win in 18 weeks this season, based on viewing estimates issued Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research.

CBS’ assault included a trio of pre-Super Bowl specials Saturday, with a “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” retrospective delivering heartening results while a Ricky Martin concert struck a flat note ratings-wise.

The Super Bowl itself put up subpar numbers, but ratings for “Survivor: The Australian Outback,” hosted by Jeff Probst, actually exceeded preliminary Nielsen estimates. In fact, the show ultimately

dropped only 22% from the postgame audience, slightly better than the decline “Friends” exhibited following the Super Bowl in 1996.

Several popular series were in reruns as the networks geared up for the rating sweeps that begin Thursday. Notably, a new “The West Wing” exhibited no ill effects from its competition with Fox’s “Temptation Island,” as the latter lost viewers after gaining ground the previous week against a repeat of the White House drama.

Among first-year series, CBS’ sitcom “Bette” continues to struggle, last week finishing fourth in its time slot, well behind NBC’s “Ed” and a rerun of Fox’s “That ‘70s Show” as well as ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Network Averages

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

*--*

Last Season week to date CBS 21.28 million 12.41 ABC 11.33 13.15 NBC 10.51 12.09 FOX 9.43 9.93 UPN 3.87 4.01 WB 3.75 3.95

*--*