Special Delivery Boosts NBC to First Win of Season

NBC claimed its first weekly win of the new TV season, while ABC--aided by the fall’s most-watched “Monday Night Football” game--scored its best rating since March en route to a solid second-place finish, based on results issued Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research.

“Friends”--which featured the birth of Phoebe’s (Lisa Kudrow) triplets--has been there for NBC in its time of need, delivering the program’s highest ratings since its second year. Coupled with “ER,” those bookends have helped keep NBC’s Thursday lineup dominant despite a dip at 9 p.m., with “Frasier” falling 4.5 million viewers short of last year’s “Seinfeld.” With both NBC and Fox pre-empting certain series for baseball, other networks filled the void. ABC’s “Home Improvement” and “Spin City” benefited from having NBC’s Tuesday sitcoms out of the picture, just as the WB’s “Dawson’s Creek” and the Shannen Doherty comeback “Charmed” capitalized on the absence of Fox’s Wednesday dramas to post that network’s highest nightly rating ever.

NBC’s adaptation of “Crime and Punishment” got slaughtered Sunday, proving no match for the CBS movie “A Marriage of Convenience,” starring Jane Seymour, or ABC’s tandem of “20/20” and “The Practice.”

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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 week Season to date NBC 13.80 million 13.54 ABC 13.34 12.57 CBS 12.64 13.61 FOX 8.50 8.89 WB 5.30 4.16 UPN 3.08 2.73

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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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Program Station Households 1. Friends KNBC 1,137,095 2. Frasier KNBC 1,122,068 3. ER KNBC 1,016,874 4. Jesse KNBC 906,671 5. Vernonica’s Closet KNBC 876,615 6. 60 Minutes KCBS 601,108 7. “Marriage of Convenience” KCBS 586,080 8. The Drew Carey Show KABC 581,071 -- Guinness World Records KTTV 581,071 10. 20/20 KABC 571,052

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Source: Nielsen Media Research.