'Father' can take pride as pack leader
Although its long-term prospects remain questionable, NBC's debuting "Father of the Pride" can at least claim victory in the week ending Sunday, drawing more than 12 million viewers. It also prevailed among young adults and middle-age viewers. "Father of the Pride's" audience was, however, less than half of the previous week's most-watched show, a night of NBC's Olympics coverage.
It was an atypical week in TV viewing overall. The GOP convention, the Labor Day holiday weekend, early premieres of some NBC and Fox shows, and a likely post-Olympics viewing fatigue all contributed to disrupted viewing patterns.
It's likely the repeat of a story about pornography is the main reason why CBS' venerable "60 Minutes" was the second most-watched show last week. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why it was up nearly 2 million viewers from the previous week and did substantially better than it did on last year's Labor Day weekend telecast. The lead-in from coverage of the U.S. Open tennis tournament may have helped too.
Two other premieres also made the top 20. NBC's drama "Hawaii" finished fourth, while Fox's premiere of the life-makeover series "Renovate My Family" finished 17th. "Family" did considerably better in the young adults demographic, finishing tied for 4th among 18- to 49-year-olds.
Overall, viewership for the week came back down to earth after the stratospheric numbers NBC generated from its Olympics coverage. NBC won the week again, averaging 7.5 million viewers (about 14.6 million fewer than the previous week). CBS was next with 7.2 million, followed by ABC (6.1), Fox (5.1), UPN (2.4) and the WB (2.1).
If the broadcast network prime-time results were a bit all over the place, it was just the opposite with cable, where the top 13 places were occupied by Fox News' "You Decide" programs from the Republican Convention. True, some of those individual programs lasted as little as nine minutes, but by any measure, Fox News thoroughly dominated cable viewing.
Jonathan Taylor
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*--* Here are the rankings for national prime-time network television last week (Aug. 30-Sept. 5) as compiled by Nielsen Media Research. They are based on the average number of people who watched a program from start to finish. Nielsen estimates there are 272.04 million potential viewers in the U.S. age 2 and older. Viewership is listed in millions. Program Net- work View- ers Program Net- work View- ers
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