Tv, Tv Ratings | featured news

Although NBC may have lost up to $200 million on the Winter Olympics, the network drew record viewership, helping it get past the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien late-night fiasco.

With skiing and figure skating as its big ticket events, NBC's Friday night coverage of the Winter Olympics had no trouble rolling to ratings wins in all key measures, even if the generally slow night led to low demo ratings.

Shani Davis, Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White are the true American Idols. In a startling turnaround from the night before, the Olympics clobbered Fox's "American Idol" in the ratings Wednesday night. The Nielsen Co. said that during the one hour the two shows competed against one another, the Olympics were seen by 30.1 million people while 18.4 million watched "American Idol."

The Super Bowl was watched by more than 106 million people, surpassing the 1983 finale of "M-A-S-H" to become the most-watched program in television history....

A popular and eye-popping mix of stars like Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga drew a TV audience of 25.8 million Americans to the Grammy Awards -- the biggest TV audience for the telecast in six years, according to preliminary television ratings on Monday.

Wednesday night's "American Idol" produced typically dominating results for FOX, but the massive drop to "Human Target" at 9 p.m. probably has to concern the network.

The show was seen by about 11 million viewers, according to Nielsen, off only about 400,000 viewers from what reruns of the show have averaged.

Repeats of CBS' flagship comedies "The Big Bang Theory" (3.0 rating/8 share in adults 18-49) and "Two and a Half Men" (2.7/7) were the highest-rated programs of the night by a mile, with a rerun of another CBS series, drama "CSI: Miami" (2.2/6) coming in third.

NBC's Dallas-Washington matchup wins night -- NBC's "Sunday Night Football," featuring a matchup of rivals Dallas and Washington, dominated the ratings action on the final Sunday of 2009.

The already-cancelled "Dollhouse" returned to FOX on Friday night with a two-hour block of episodes and the results were fairly predictable. While the first hour was up very slightly from the show's last airing, by the second hour, "Dollhouse" had fallen under 2 million viewers.