• by Wayne Friedman , October 20, 2006

The game remains the same on Wednesday--ABC narrowly wins over CBS.

This time around, "Dancing with the Stars" improved slightly, but "Lost" lost out on some viewers. "Stars" moved up to a 5.0/14 for the 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. time period; "Lost" fell to a 6.6/16 from a 6.9/17 the week before.

CBS will claim that "Criminal Minds" is now virtually on par with "Lost" in overall viewers, although it's behind two whole ratings points in 18-49s with the ABC show. In overall viewers, "Lost" had 16.3 million; "Minds" took 16.2 million. Interestingly, both "Minds" and "Lost" each lost about 500,000 overall viewers from the week before. "Minds" 18-49 numbers were flat at a 4.5/11 versus the week before.

What's the end result for Wednesday evening? For the night, ABC came in at an exact 4.9/13 versus the previous week. CBS slowed down to a 4.3/11 from a 4.6/12--mostly from a slight drop from in "CSI: NY," which came in with a still-dominant 10 p.m. time period-leading 5.2/14.

NBC's "30 Rock" and "20 Good Years" weren't good enough. Both sitcoms dropped again--"Rock" to a 2.3/7, and "Years" to a 2.0/5. This put the network in fifth place behind The CW during the 8 p.m. period. Overall, NBC ended up in fourth place with a 2.7/7--down from the previous week's 2.9/8.

Third-place Fox was a factor for the night. Its League Championship Series, the St. Louis-New York baseball game, perked up to a 3.5/10--slightly better than the previous week's divisional series Detroit-Oakland game, which took in a 3.2/9.

The CW continued to roll along with the best-rated program on its schedule--"America's Next Top Model"--grabbing a strong 2.7/8, as well as second place in adults 18-34 versus the first-place "Stars." For the night, "Model" was just behind NBC with a 2.1/6.