Made-for-TV wives are all the rage these days.

With the summer season in full swing, the Nielsens were chock-full of spousal material, from the record-setting cable debuts by USA's The Starter Wife and Lifetime's Army Wives, to ABC's lesser combo of Wife Swap and Ex-Wives Club.

The limited-run Starter Wife, starring Debra Messing, attraced 5.4 million viewers for its two-hour premiere on Thursday. The series, which will run for four more hours, also did well in the key demos, ranking as not only the most watched cable show of the night among viewers 18-49, but also beating every broadcast network except the CSI-powered CBS.

Army Wives, which stars Kim Delaney and  Catherine Bell, premiered to 3.5 million viewers on Sunday, the biggest debut numbers for the estrogen-friendly network.

They were among a batch of strong cable shows that also included the penultimate, Bobby- and Silvio-targeting The Sopranos (8 million), the History Channel's Jedi-sanctioned Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed (3.1 million, a new viewership record for the network) and Bravo's Anthony-crowning finale of Shear Genius (1.3 million).

Elsewhere:

• The View looks to be a lot less rosie sans Rosie—the show averaged 3.8 million viewers for O'Donnell's final meltdown week and bringing her  tenure to a close with a whopping 19 percent more viewers than last season.
• Fox's finale of House dominated the ratings in a week where most summer shows underperformed. The mind-bending, perhaps cast-altering episode 17.2 million viewers, more than 5 million ahead of its nearest competitor.
• So You Think You Can Dance is shaping up to be Fox's breakout summer hit, placing both Thursday's result show (number four, 10.6 million) and Wednesday's dance-off (number nine, 9.3 million) in the top 10. Fox also showed promise with last night's third-season debut of Hell's Kitchen (8.4 million), which should help take the sting away from the tanking Mark Burnett-Steven Speilberg series On the Lot. The latter's two episodes last week drew 4 million and 2.8 million, and Fox quickly decided to consolidate the show into a single episode per week.
• However, there was better news for the launch of Burnett's Pirate Master (7 million) on CBS, even though it didn't exactly make like Captain Jack Sparrow.
• ABC's Boston Legal got some a favorable verdict from its season-ending "Trial of the Century" (number seven, 9.9 million).
• But the network had mixed success with unscripted fare. About 7.7 million tuned in to find out which celebrity impersonator was The Next Best Thing and the prime-time final round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee spelled D-E-C-E-N-T (7.1 million), but ABC's Monday night combo of Wife Swap (6.2 million), Ex-Wives Club (5.3 million) and Supernanny (5.3 million)
• Finally, 7.2 million tuned in to see Miss USA tumble and Miss Japan get crowned at the 2007 Miss Universe Pageant.

Led by its lineup of crime-show repeats, CBS won the battle for total viewers, averaging 7.6 million for the week, followed by Fox (6.7 million), ABC (5.4 million), NBC (4.8 million) and the CW (1.9 million). In the 18-49 demo, Fox and CBS swapped places.

To help explain last week's regime change, NBC's 4.8 million viewership figure was its smallest prime-time audience since at least 1991, the furthest back Nielsen Media Research had readily available data for. The once proud Peacock bottomed out with an airing of the Stanley Cup finals between the Anaheim Ducks and Ottawa Senators (1.6 million).

Here's a rundown of the most watched prime-time programs for the week ended Sunday, per Nielsen Media Research:

1. House, Fox, 17.23 million viewers
2. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 12.09 million viewers
3. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 10.75 million viewers
4. So You Think You Can Dance (Thursday), Fox 10.58 million viewers
5. CSI: NY, CBS, 10.1 million viewers
6. NCIS, CBS, 9.97 million viewers
7. Boston Legal, ABC, 9.93 million viewers
8. CSI: Miami, CBS, 9.4 million viewers
9. So You Think You Can Dance (Wednesday), Fox, 9.33 million viewers
10. Shark, CBS, 9.27 million viewers