George may be creepy, but he helps ‘Housewives’

The demise of creepy pharmacist George on Sunday lifted ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” to the top of the weekly Nielsen Media Research rankings.

Figures released Tuesday showed that CBS continued its overall dominance during Thanksgiving week. It registered five of the seven most-watched programs to become the first network to win each of the first 10 weeks of the season since NBC in 1988.

But “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” was knocked from its usual perch atop the ratings -- perhaps because it was telecast on Thanksgiving and some of its regular viewers couldn’t stomach a forensics tale after a full meal.

An estimated 25.9 million viewers watched “Desperate Housewives,” in which George continued trying to manipulate Bree to the very end. Surging “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC was the week’s third most popular show. CBS drew strong numbers for the first of many holiday-themed programs, the TV movie “Silver Bells.”

CBS averaged 14.2 million viewers for the week. ABC had 11.4 million but won among the 18-to-49-year-old demographic watched closely by advertisers. NBC had 9.2 million viewers, Fox had 9 million, UPN had 3.3 million, the WB had 3.3 million and Pax TV had 610,000.

NBC’s “Nightly News” won the evening news race, averaging 11 million viewers. ABC’s “World News Tonight” had 9.3 million viewers and the “CBS Evening News” had 8.2 million.