CBS crushes competition, dominates ratings

NEW YORK — The television ratings make it look like CBS was the only broadcast network working last week.

Take away Sunday's NFL broadcast and its pregame shows on NBC, plus "The Simpsons" on Fox, and every show in the Nielsen Co.'s top 20 was on CBS.

CBS dominated with regular series like "NCIS" and "The Big Bang Theory," and the "Survivor: Samoa" finale. Twelve of the network's regular, nonsports series last week were seen by more than 10 million people; the other networks had none.

Jay Leno's prime-time show had some small signs of life last week, particularly against poor-performing ABC shows like "Castle," "The Forgotten" and "Eastwick."

Over on cable, the Kardashians continued to deliver for the E! Entertainment network. Sunday night's "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" special had 4.2 million viewers, the most-watched program in E! Entertainment's history, Nielsen said.

CBS averaged 11.5 million viewers in prime-time last week (7.0 rating, 12 share), a huge margin over second-place NBC's 7.3 million (4.5, 8). Fox averaged 6.7 million viewers (4.1, 7), ABC had 4.9 million (3.1, 5), the CW had 1.5 million (1.0, 2) and ION Television had 1.2 million (0.7, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with an average of 3.4 million viewers (1.7 rating, 3 share). TeleFutura had a 1.1 million average and Telemundo 960,000 (both 0.5, 1) and Azteca had 200,000 (0.1, 0).

On his farewell "World News" broadcast on ABC last Friday, Charles Gibson beat NBC's "Nightly News" by 250,000 viewers, Nielsen said. NBC and Brian Williams won the week, however, making it 61 wins out of the last 62. "Nightly News" averaged 9.2 million viewers for the week (6.0 rating, 11 share), "World News" had 8.5 million (5.7, 11) and the "CBS Evening News" had 6.2 million (4.2, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,149,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.9 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.