Glee lived up to the hype. NCIS lived up to its legacy. Dancing With the Stars lost a star, but not a step.
A ratings rundown of Tuesday's season premieres:
• NCIS (18.9 million viewers, per prelim estimates) : The night's most-watched show. Per usual. If it was a bit down from last fall, then remember its competition at 8 p.m. was way up.
• Glee (12.3 million): Meet the competition. Its second-season opener was the night's most-watched show—by far—among the cool kids. (Yeah, so much for the storyline spin that New Directions is as unhip as ever.)
• Dancing With the Stars results episode (18.3 million): Since it's hard to believe the masses were just dying to see Kyle Massey eliminated, we'll chalk up the franchise's most-watched results premiere ever to the franchise being on a roll.
• NCIS: LA (15.7 million): With DWTS up, this sophomore show was off by about 2.5 million viewers from last fall's series premiere. But still big. Obviously.
• Detroit 187 (9.8 million): Remember The Forgotten? It did a better job holding onto its DWTS lead-in than this freshman cop show, which actually did OK—it just didn't have The Jay Leno Show to kick around at 10 p.m.
• Raising Hope (7.5 million) and Running WIlde (5.9 million): Compared to Lone Star, these Fox newbies did great. And Raising Hope, in particular, did a solid job in a tough time slot. But a year ago, a mid-season Hell's Kitchen was even more solid in the 9 p.m. slot—and without a Glee-ful lead-in.
• The Biggest Loser (7.2 million): Did its thing.
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Welcome fall—and fall TV—at Watch With Kristin.