Ratings Round-Up: Return Of The CSI...?

See Also: 'Swap Meet' Episode Guide

With last week's chief competitor, Fox's Major League Baseball Championship Series largely not in direct opposition, the CSI shows thrived once again... with the exception of young contender CSI: New York, which battled to take its place at its parent's side in terms of ratings dominance but didn't quite match up to the original.

Without the domination of the baseball-fuelled Fox empire, CSI: Miami was free to rebel this week and take back the audience – resulting in 21.22 million viewers giving their allegiance to its cause. All in all, this gave last Monday's episode "Hell Night" a hyper-drive to the top of the ratings pile, with a final ratings score of 16.1/24.

These ratings mean that out of all the households in America, 16.1% were watching Miami on the night, rising to 24% when factoring only in those households actually watching TV at 10:00pm. This represented a smooth recovery from the 14.2/21 dip it experienced last week.

There was something of a disturbance in the force of the shows though, when CSI: New York's "Grand Master" failed to conquer the universe of primetime TV, finishing third in its 10:00pm slot on Wednesday night behind not only Fox's baseball game, but also veteran TV show Law & Order. It brought in 12.55 million viewers and a rating of 9.5/14, though it seemed to suffer from a comparatively poor lead-in according to some critics (not to mention being pre-empted the previous two weeks).

Then followed the formidable Death Star of the franchise – the huge, all powerful ratings behemoth that is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. "Swap Meet" bested not only everything else on Wednesday night with its rating of 20.0/29, but also its own performance last week (18.8/26). Admittedly last week was marred by competition from baseball, but it still compared favourably to its own performance two weeks ago (28.88 million this week compared to 28.23 million a fortnight ago). With such huge ratings, CSI continues to be the light-sabre... er, life-saver of the CSI movement.

For more information on last week's ratings, visit Mediaweek's Programming insider page.

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