'Happy Days' Reunion Keeps 'CSI' In Check

On the first night of the February sweeps, ABC stole some of CSI's thunder by airing an unexpectedly popular two-hour special on the 30th anniversary of Happy Days.

For the special, ABC invited many of the series' main stars and best-known guest actors to reminisce about the comedy show's decade-long run, and introduce clips of classic scenes from the series. The special started at 8:00pm, and according to Reuters attracted around 20 million viewers during its first hour, easily defeating a special rerun of CSI's "Dead Ringer," which only attracted 11.5 million viewers.

At 9:00pm, CSI's "Nesting Dolls" did manage to defeat the Happy Days special by winning the favour of 24.8 million viewers, making it the most popular show to air on all of Thursday night. However, the strength of Happy Days did mean that CSI scored its lowest ratings so far this season in the important category of viewers aged between 18 and 49 - a group in which many viewers probably still probably had fond memories of Happy Days, and thus decided to forego CSI for one week. Meanwhile, for Thursday's three primetime hours combined, NBC managed to win the overall night, thanks in particular to strong showings by The Apprentice and ER.

Earlier in the week, NBC was also successful, when its new show Medium contained to perform well against CSI: Miami. A new episode of the psychic crime drama was watched by 15.8 million viewers - exactly a million more than tuned in for Miami's "Hell Night," but then that was a repeat.

On Wednesday, CBS pre-empted a planned showing of CSI: New York's "A Man A Mile" to cover President Bush's State of the Union speech, but at least for business reasons, the network may well be wishing it had been able to air regular drama programming anyway. Only about 7 million people tuned in to CBS to watch Bush's speech, a far cry from the 17 million that CSI: New York attracted last week (story). But at least other networks didn't do much better: the Washington Post reported that Bush's State of the Union speech was the least-watched of his career so far, and only attracted 38 million viewers.

For more information on last week's ratings, check out Reuters' reports for Monday and Thursday, as well as the Washington Post's report on Wednesday.

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