"Dance" Breaks a Leg

Tue., Aug. 2, 2005 4:35 PM PDT by

The dance fever has broken.

A summer of flashy moves, led by ABC's Dancing with the Stars, looks to be winding down in the shoes of So You Think You Can Dance.

Ratings for the Fox competition show (14th place, 8 million) were down more than 20 percent from its premiere in the TV week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research. Among all-important younger viewers, Dance remained a Top 10 hit.

Continuing to run the series through the paces, Fox will offer 90-minute editions of Dance on Wednesday and Aug. 10, when the final field of 16 will be revealed.

Although it's early, Dance is taking the opposite road of Fox's other notable summer entry, Hell's Kitchen. The latter reality show started out modestly, picked up steam and peaked Monday with a season-high 8.9 million viewers for the final hour of back-to-back episodes that saw Michael, the executive chef from Fort Collins, Colorado, knighted by harsh taskmaster Gordon Ramsay. Last week's installment finished in a respectable 20th place (7.4 million), and proved an even bigger draw among 18-to-49-year-olds than So You Think You Can Dance.

Perhaps Dance could use a little of Ramsay's fire. Or, probably more to the point, it could use a lot of Kelly Monaco's Dancing with the Stars' two-piece outfits.

Elsewhere:

Cable mounted an army of strong season premieres, led by Over There (4.1 million), producer Steven Bochco's Iraq war drama for FX. Other notables: MTV's Laguna Beach (3.6 million) and Lifetime's Rob Lowe miniseries Beach Girls (3.6 million).
The demise of Nate (Peter Krause) breathed new life into HBO's Six Feet Under (2.5 million).
No amount of buzz seems to be able to bring more viewers to HBO's Entourage, holding steady at 1.9 million hangers on.
A new Friday night episode of Disney Channel's That's So Raven (4.2 million) schooled reruns on ABC, CBS and Fox.
Among the Friday reruns that got schooled: Veronica Mars, the plucky UPN P.I. show getting a shot at the CBS schedule. While the ratings weren't great (3.3 million, 83rd place for the first episode; 3.2 million, 84th place for the second episode), they were greater than the 2.5 million the show averaged last season on UPN.
TLC's made-for-UPN search for a new member, R U the Girl with T-Boz & Chilli (87th place, 2.7 million), has proved about as quasi-compelling to viewers as INXS' made-for-CBS search for a new singer, Rock Star (averaging 5.3 million viewers for three episodes).
ABC's Brat Camp (seventh place, 8.9 million) was the week's most watched non-rerun; ABC's Empire (70th place, 4.2 million) was the week's most watched season finale for a show about ancient Rome that the modern-day United States largely ignored; Kathy Hilton of NBC's I Want to Be a Hilton (79th place, 3.6 million) was the week's most watched non-pay-per-download Hilton. Some of these accomplishments were relative.

Overall, CBS led the way in total viewers (averaging 7 million), and the 18-49 demo.

NBC ran second in viewers (5.8 million), followed by ABC (5.2 million) and Fox (5.1 million). UPN (2.8 million) made easy work of the WB (1.7 million).

Here's a look of the 10 most watched prime-time shows for the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research:

1. CSI, CBS, 13.4 million viewers
2. Without a Trace, CBS, 11.3 million viewers
3. CSI: Miami, CBS, 10.3 million viewers
4. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 9.6 million viewers
5. Law & Order: Criminal Intent, NBC, 9 million viewers
6. NCIS, CBS, 8.96 million viewers
7. Brat Camp, ABC, 8.9 million viewers
8. Everybody Loves Raymond, CBS, 8.5 million viewers
9. Cold Case, CBS, 8.4 million viewers
10. Law & Order, NBC, 8.3 million viewers

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