The View Vents, People Watch—and the Top 10 Things to Know About This Week's TV Ratings

ABC daytime show's ratings up during contentious presidential campaign season

The "Hot Topics" just seem hotter this fall. So do the ratings.

So far this presidential season, ABC's The View is up 8 percent in viewers over last fall, the network said. Among Elisabeth Hasselbeck-aged young women, it's been the No. 1 daytime show four weeks running.

The View joins Saturday Night Live, David Letterman, The Rachel Maddow Show and Jon Stewart's The Daily Show as beneficiaries of the campaign—Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, related arguments and all.

Elsewhere, Lindsay Lohan is good for Ugly Betty—no, really—plus nine other lessons from the latest Nielsen rankings and stats:

1. Lohan won't be back for long, but her return to Ugly Betty (8.7 million viewers) helped the slipping ABC show to its best numbers since premiere week.

2. How tough are times for TV shows that aren't about Obama, Palin, et al? An encore broadcast—read: a rerun!—of an SNL "Weekend Update" special as aired on Saturday night!—the dead zone!—outdrew: ABC's Dirty Sexy Money and Pushing Daisies; NBC's My Own Worst Enemy, Life, Kath & Kim and Lipstick Jungle; Fox's Prison Break; and CBS' The Ex List. Not one of those series pulled in even 6 million viewers.

3. For its crime, The Ex List got benched; Lipstick Jungle got a reprieve, sort of. It's being shuffled off to Friday.

4. If you still watch TV on TV, you are old. The median age of a CBS viewer is 53.  Among the Big Four networks, NBC's the "youngest" at 45.5.

5. If you watch Fringe, and you're not old, you're probably TiVo-ing. Citing the latest Nielsen DVR playback stats, Fox said the freshman show's rating among adults 18-49 shot up 20 percent once seven days worth of playback was added in.

6. If you watch the CW, you're not old, and you just might be saving the network. As its One Tree Hill (3.7 million) hit a series high in adults 18-34, CBS Corp. chieftain (and CW fate-decider) Les Moonves didn't talk about pulling the plug on the network in the New York Times.

7. If you still watch NBC's My Name Is Earl (6.4 million), and the Nielsen numbers suggest you don't, maybe you catch it on Hulu, now sixth among the top streaming sites.

8. The weekend box office was not enough for the High School Musical franchise. A Thursday night Disney Channel repeat of HSM2 (4 million) was cable's top movie, edging out a Wednesday night Disney Channel repeat of—what else?—the original HSM (3.8 million). 

9. More Wizards of Waverly Place means more viewers—4.8 million for the Disney Channel two-parter, tops among all cable series.  

10. AMC's Mad Men might never be a hit. But after Sunday's finale, which drew a respectable 1.7 million, it might not be the barely seen show it once was.

Here's a rundown of the most-watched broadcast network prime-time shows for the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research:

1. CSI, CBS, 19.5 million viewers
2. Dancing With the Stars (Monday), ABC, 18.5 million viewers
3. NCIS, CBS, 17.2 million viewers
4. Dancing With the Stars (Tuesday), ABC, 16.4 million viewers
5. Desperate Housewives, ABC, 16 million viewers
6. World Series Game 4 (Tampa Bay vs. Philadelphia), Fox, 15.5 million viewers
   
7. The Mentalist, CBS, 15.3 million viewers
   
8. Criminal Minds, CBS, 15 million viewers
   
9. World Series Game 1 (Tampa Bay vs. Philadelphia), Fox, 14.634 million viewers
   
10.  Two and a Half Men, CBS, 14.63 million viewers