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Paris Soaks Up Summer Ratings
Not even Paris Hilton can heat up the summer TV season.
The second-season premiere of Fox's The Simple Life, starring the sex-tape star and bestest friend Nicole Richie, was watched by 9.76 million men, women and dudes who can't afford pay-per-view Internet downloads.
That's down from the 13 million who caught the inaugural episode of Hilton and Richie's unscripted rural excursions last December.
Still, in what's shaping up as a tepid summer, The Simple Life 2: Road Trip premiere ranked a solid 13th for the TV week ended Sunday, per Nielsen Media Research. A so-called "premiere special," airing an hour before the actual episode, ranked 23rd, with 8.29 million viewers.
Overall, the show ran first in its 9 p.m., Wednesday time slot, edging an all-new episode of NBC's Last Comic Standing 2 (14th place), which averaged 9.755 million for the 9-10 p.m. hour.
Fox also got decent numbers from the launches of Method Man's least favorite comedy, Method and Red (24th place, 8.27 million), and Quintuplets (29th place, 7.1 million).
Premieres for the prime-time soap North Shore (38th place, 5.9 million) and the Vegas reality series The Casino (39th place, 5.8 million) produced cooler results for the network.
For all the effort put into its slate of new shows for its new-fangled year-round schedule, Fox is being rewarded with 26 percent fewer viewers than it got over the same time period last summer.
NBC, which also invested heavily on new product for the flip-flop season, is down double digits, as well--off 10 percent in viewers through Sunday.
By comparison, rerun-loving CBS, which believes audiences deserve one more chance to catch that JAG they slept through in October, is only down 3 percent.
ABC, meanwhile, is the only network to post a gain so far this summer, up 2 percent in viewers, thanks to the NBA finals and the fact that its shows hardly seem like repeats to viewers who ignored them the first time around.
Also worth noting:
A chat with the book-pushing former President Clinton on CBS' 60 Minutes was watched in nearly a fifth of all plugged-in TV homes on Sunday night--second place, 15.8 million viewers.A 20/20 sitdown on ABC with Esther was watched by 6.5 million (34th place) persons left wondering where the hell the space aliens are keeping their Madonna.
ABC News' hard-hitting series on wacky weddings, Weddings, debuted before 6.5 million soft-news junkies, good for 35th place.
With the moviegoing public apparently satisfied with Vin Diesel, NBC's Next Action Star reality series got off to a rocky start (47th place, 5.5 million) in a special Monday airing and an even worse start in its 8 p.m., Tuesday home (59th place, 4.9 million).
Doomed Fox comedy Oliver Beene returned to prime time in un-fine fashion--100th place, 2.2 million.
Thanks to Clinton and its stable of slightly used CSIs, CBS easily won the week, averaging 8.6 million viewers. NBC trailed, with 7.2 million.
ABC, which only got one more game out of the top-ranked basketball playoffs, fell to third, with 6.4 million. Fox floundered in fourth, averaging 4.7 million.
UPN topped the WB, 2.5 million to 2.3 million.
Here's a rundown of the 10 most watched prime-time shows for the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research:
1. 2004 NBA Finals--Game 5, ABC, 21.8 million
2. 60 Minutes, CBS, 15.8 million
3. CSI, CBS, 14.1 million
4. CSI: Miami, CBS, 14 million
5. Without a Trace, CBS, 12.8 million
6. Law & Order, NBC, 11.8 million
7. Cold Case, CBS, 11.4 million
8. Everybody Loves Raymond, CBS, 11.37 million
9. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 11 million
10. Last Comic Standing 2, NBC, 10.4 million
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